Daily Archives: October 9, 2023

Republican Rep. Laurie Schlegel says she never saw herself running for public office. Yet, just a couple of years into her first term in the Lousiana House of Representatives, she is recognized as one of the most effective legislators in the state possibly the nation for passing a popular law that protects children from viewing onscreen sex.

In the past, Schlegels husband encouraged her to join political races, but she told The Federalist she always shut it down. She is a busy mother, counselor, and community member who, until recently, never wanted to run a campaign.

My husband is a judge here and so I never thought I would also enter into elected office. There was already one in the family, so it just wasnt something that was on my radar, Schlegel explained.

When a state House position opened after the Republican representative for Louisianas 82nd District abruptly resigned in January 2021, however, Schlegel decided to throw her hat in the ring.

It just sort of felt right. I had to make a very quick decision. He resigned in January, and the election was going to be in March, Schlegel said.

She won the seat with nearly 3,000 votes. By May 2021, Schlegel was officially a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. One of her first orders of business was cracking down on the porn industrys grip on Pelican State children.

For almost a century, judicial precedents and legislative inaction have allowed the most horrifying sexual content to be easily accessible today to anyone, of any age. The kind of pornography kids can see includes torture, violence, degrading treatment, and all other manner of psychologically damaging material. In addition, as Fight The New Drug points out, Today, porn sites receive more website traffic in the U.S. than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined.

Schlegel decided to take this situation head-on.

We as a society have accepted certain behaviors need to be age-restricted alcohol, gaming, [in-store] pornography and so its very consistent with public policy to actually protect children, Schlegel told The Federalist.

Schlegel didnt run for the legislature intending to challenge the multibillion-dollar porn industry. Yet just a few months into her term, she started working to legally shield children from the distortion of intimacy depicted in X-rated videos.

Every single day porn websites are allowing minors to enter into their sites with actually no safeguards, Schlegel said.

These videos, Schlegel said, are not your daddys Playboy but hardcore pornography that is proven to negatively affect adolescents sexual and mental development. Thanks to ubiquitous, internet-connected cell phones and tablets, the average first age of exposure to porn has dropped to 11 years old, with some kids encountering it as young as 7.

What theyre seeing is violence masquerading as sex. A lot of the research shows that 90 percent of the leading pornography scenes are aggressive towards women. Thats what little kids are seeing, Schlegel said.

Premature introduction to explicit content that frequently romanticizes incest, rape, and other sexual horrors is linked to myriad mental and sexual disorders, as well as low mood, melancholy, lower self-esteem, and decreased appetite.

As a practicing licensed counselor and certified sex addiction therapist, Schlegel is all too familiar with the damage porn does to minds, bodies, and souls. Shes spent years treating clients who struggle with rampant porn addictions and compulsive sexual behavior, an uncontrolled hyper-fixation on indulging sexual fantasies and impulses that stemmed from prolonged interactions with visual sexual content.

If adults can become scarred from repeated exposure to onscreen sex, the havoc porn can wreak on children, who lack the cognitive function to contextualize it, is immeasurable. Despite the dangers porn poses, kids are increasingly exposed to it early in life.

Once you really fully know the gravity of the situation and what kids are seeing online and how its impacting them, we cant just sit back and just do nothing, Schlegel said.

Schlegels professional life wasnt the only thing pulling her to rein in the porn industry. On a personal level, Schlegel has a heart for children and sees her role as a mother as her highest calling.

I do feel like our responsibility as adults is to help raise up the next generation to be well-functioning, adjusted adults. Thats why Im super passionate about things around kids, Schlegel said.

Before Schlegel filed her bill aimed at curbing the porn industry, she sought to educate her colleagues on how pervasive and invasive onscreen sex is among minors.

She brought world-renowned sociologist Dr. Gail Dines, a leading anti-porn scholar, into the state legislature to give a webinar on the harms of porn. The event, hosted by the bodys womens caucus, attracted male and female Democrat and Republican legislators. They learned how exposure to sexually explicit material tanks mental health and normalizes dangerous, degrading, and predatory bedroom behavior.

Its not just an opinion, its not just a moral perspective, its actually a harms-based perspective where peer-reviewed research conclusively shows its harmful to children, Schlegel said. I think once you really fully grasp that, just like the body did, you have to do something.

Do something they did. Once she established that age verification technology was available and, with the help of several constitutional attorneys, determined it legally possible to mandate it, Schlegel pitched House Bill 142. It requires websites with at least 33.3 percent pornographic material to confirm users are older than 18 before granting them access to the full site.

Schlegels hard work gained her bill the sponsorship of nearly 50 bipartisan colleagues. The bill was rewarded with a nearly unanimous vote in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate and eagerly signed by the states Democrat governor.

Its difficult to determine the ages of the people who made up the bulk of porn site visits in the state, but once Schlegels law went into effect in January 2022, traffic on sex-selling websites in Louisiana fell 80 percent.

Ive gotten a lot of really great feedback, Schlegel said. People even disclosing how theyve been watching [porn] since they were a little kid and how they have been struggling and they wish they would have had something a safeguard them when they were younger.

It wasnt long before Schlegel led the charge to pass another bill,HB-77, which emboldened the states attorney general to investigate and fine any websites that failed to comply with her first law.

I went through with the legislature and I actually copied down titles of the videos that were on the landing page of one of the noncompliant pornography sites. Most of the descriptions are about having sex with teens and incest, Schlegel said. These things are not normal and natural. And thats what a young mind is viewing.

Schlegel faced criticism from porn providers who claimed the law overstepped the Consitution, but she stood her ground. She said her legislation was solely rooted in her desire to do right by our children, not impose her Christian faith or restrict adults behavior.

My law is to protect children. Its not to inhibit adults from their First Amendment right. I made sure I narrowly tailored this law to protect adults First Amendment rights and not make an unduly burdensome, Schlegel said.

Schlegels legislation couldnt have been introduced at a more perfect time.

In 2021, the nations loneliness epidemic reached new heights. Americans who had suffered two decades of rapid technology advances and years of government-mandated isolation were looking for stimulation and intimate connections. Many found solace with onscreen prostitutes working for industry giants like Pornhub.

In a country where 97 percent of children as young as 3 years old have home internet access, the rapid rise in traffic on porn sites was not comforting to parents or voters.

When Schlegels bills soared through her state legislature, it made safeguarding kids look easy to more than a dozen other states. They quickly took up her model for protecting children from the physical, mental, and emotional injuries posed by websites selling sex.

Schlegel did not intend to shop out her strategy to other states, but politicians all across the nation flocked to her phone to ask for advice about how to get their own protections against porn on the books. Some of these copycat laws fared better in legislatures and courts than others, but Schlegel said that was to be expected.

I knew that there were going to be legal challenges because the porn industry is a multibillion-dollar industry that is highly unregulated, she said. And because of that, theyve been so irresponsible.

Court rulings on states laws have been what Schlegel calls a mixed bag and will likely eventually need to be decided by the Supreme Court, which hasnt ruled on a porn case since the early 2000s.

So much has changed since then, Schlegel said. There was no iPad, there was no iPhone back then. It wasnt like we had little computers in our pockets that kids have today.

In a way, Schlegel views the legal challenges and political hurdles facing other states on this issue as an encouragement.

When you see an issue and Republicans and Democrats are joining together, it means its a big issue, Schlegel said. And I think youre seeing that around protecting kids online, whether its in our country and other countries. Im very grateful that this has become a national discussion.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Meet The Lawmaker Who Successfully Shielded Kids From Porn - The Federalist

CNN published an exclusive statement from Trumps longest-serving White House chief of staff, John Kelly, on Monday, purporting to confirm the Atlantics election-season hit piece from three years ago. The media, it seems, is going to run the exact same inference campaign it conducted in 2020.

Trump, according to the anonymously sourced story from Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, disparaged the graves of WWI veterans on a trip to France. According to The Atlantic, the president canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside of Paris in 2018 because of his hair.

Though numerous outlets including NBC News, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Axios, and The New York Times contend that Kelly had confirmed the stories, a closer reading tells us something different. What can I add that has not already been said? the former chief of staff told CNNs Jake Tapper, prefacing his statement before mentioning the alleged Aisne-Marne incident. That is not a confirmation, but a retelling.

[Trump] blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying the helicopter couldnt fly and that the Secret Service wouldnt drive him there. Neither claim was true, Goldberg wrote without a single on-the-record source three years ago.

Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway covered the saga in her book on the 2020 election, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

In fact, both claims were true, she wrote. A visit by helicopter was deemed unsafe by military officials because of low cloud cover, and so was a drive through crowded Paris streets and the winding country roads from Paris to the site of the cemetery about fifty miles outside of the city.

Even John Bolton, who was Trumps National Security Adviser during the trip and who later capitalized on anti-Trump sentiment upon leaving the White House, disputed The Atlantics account.

The weather was bad, and Kelly and I spoke about whether to travel as planned to the Chateau-Thierry Belleau Wood monuments and nearby American Cemeteries, where many US World War I dead were buried, Bolton wrote in his White House memoir.

Marine Ones crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery. The ceiling was not too low for Marines to fly in combat, but flying POTUS was obviously something very different. If a motorcade was necessary, it could take between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes each way, along roads that were not exactly freeways, posing an unacceptable risk that we could not get the President out of France quickly enough in case of an emergency. It was a straightforward decision to cancel the visit but very hard for a Marine like Kelly to recommend, having originally been the one to suggest Belleau Wood Trump agreed, and it was decided that others would drive to the cemetery instead.

But Trump, according to Goldbergs tale, rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead.

Why should I go to that cemetery? Goldbergs anonymous sources claimed Trump said. Its filled with losers.

Goldberg also published allegations from anonymous sources that Trump issued more derogatory comments about deceased Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, telling White House staff in 2018 were not going to support that losers funeral.

Kellys statement Monday marks the only time a source has gone on record to support Goldbergs allegations, which, at this point, one might conclude were probably planted by Kelly in the first place.

While Goldbergs story can now count one anti-Trump source on record offering a confirmation that wasnt actually a real confirmation at all nearly two dozen officials from the Trump White House reportedly called the hit piece false.

Given Trumps enthusiastic visits with military service members and to memorial sites throughout his presidency, the Atlantic story also defies common sense.

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Kelly's 'Confirmation' Of Fake Trump Story Isn't Confirmation At All - The Federalist

Forever war enthusiast Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) declared Tuesday that the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House was tantamount to a terrorist attack, suggesting that the eight House members who voted with Democrats to remove McCarthy were, themselves, terrorists.

We saw a similar thing happen to Boehner, Ryan, and now McCarthy. Im sure the next speaker is going to be subjected to the same terrorist attacks, Cornyn said. Later, Cornyn doubled down on his remarks, writing on X, A handful [of] House members just want to blow up the institution and themselves in the process. Sad.

To be clear, a cut-and-dry democratic vote to remove someone from a place of power is the farthest thing from a terror attack, which involves a premeditated, violent assault that inflicts injury, death, and fear on a populace.

In likening eight Republicans to terrorists, Cornyn joins the left in their campaign to label virtually all conservatives the very people Cornyn claims to represent as dangerous domestic extremists and terrorists.

The catalyst for this slanderous narrative was the events of Jan. 6, 2021, which the deep state used to vilify, torture, and, without due process, imprison innocent conservatives for the crime of questioning a rigged election. Countless peaceful J6 protesters were labeled domestic terrorists by the feds, Democrats, corporate media, and even Republican leaders.

The terrorism accusation spread from those present at the capitol to anyone who identifies with the right. Indeed, last year, during a discussion about the Jan. 6, 2021 protest, Republican Russia hoaxer and disgraced Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe likened conservatives to members of the Islamic Caliphate and called for more robust surveillance of mainstream conservatives.

McCabes sadistic hopes have largely come true. A report published today in Newsweek detailed how the FBI has quietly created a new category of domestic terrorists, known as Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremism (AGAAVEs). Classified data obtained by Newsweek, however, reveals that Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremism is just code for the supporters of former President Donald Trump. The new label is a way for the Biden DOJ to target people based on their political beliefs without being explicit.

According to FBI data obtained by Newsweek, nearly two-thirds of the FBIs current investigations are focused on Trump supporters.

None of this should be surprising given that President Joe Biden repeatedly tells us exactly what he thinks about half the American public. Donald Trump and MAGARepublicansare a threat to the very soul of this country, Biden tweeted last September.

It doesnt stop with Trump supporters. After Jan. 6, Bidens FBI launched an investigation into terrorist parents who opposed child mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory at local school board meetings. In a brazen violation of the First Amendment, the FBI investigated and seemingly infiltrated and surveilled Latin mass-attending Catholics, whom the bureau labeled Radical-Traditionalist Catholics and potential Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.

The feds have also declared war on peaceful pro-life protesters, raiding their homes at gunpoint in the dead of night and charging them with federal crimes that will likely lead to massive fines and prison time.

Cornyns statement is consistent with what he truly is: controlled opposition. He supports federal legislation that brazenly violates the Second Amendment; applauds the risky experimental Covid vaccines, which were forced on large swaths of the American public with complete disregard for bodily autonomy; pushes for legislation allowing the Biden administration to force public schools to teach racist, anti-American Critical Race Theory; opposes House Republicans who aretrying to investigate Democrats witch hunt against former President Donald Trump; and, continues to support fueling the bloody conflict in Ukraine by demanding blank checks be sent to Volodymyr Zelensky. (Zelensky, notably, refuses to hold elections until the war is over and has moved to restrict the religious practices of Ukraines second-largest denomination of Orthodox Christians.)

Like the Democrats and their partners in the deep state, Cornyn deeply loathes the genuinely conservative sect of the Republican Party and, like the left, sees utility in labeling them terrorists. Leftists want to wield and maintain power by force, and their way of doing so is by demonizing and criminalizing political opposition. Throughout history, dehumanizing lies of this nature have led to unimaginable atrocities. Any Republican who parrots the narrative that conservatives are terrorists is not an ally theyre a snake in the grass.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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John Cornyn Joins Deep State In Calling Conservatives Terrorists - The Federalist

Thursday afternoon in a Washington, D.C., federal court, former President Donald Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case pending against him there for his alleged actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The motion cites presidential immunity as a ground to dismiss the case in its entirety.

The motion persuasively argues that the D.C. case should be dismissed, and if past practice is any guide all proceedings could and should be stayed while this issue is litigated fully, all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary. Notably, this same reasoning should apply to the ongoing Georgia prosecution as well. A number of legal commentators have anticipated this move and have stated from the outset that presidential immunity should be an absolute bar to the prosecution of Trump for his alleged acts in office that underlie the federal prosecution in D.C.

In essence, President Trump is arguing that presidents, even after their terms in office are over, are absolutely immune from criminal prosecutions arising out of their acts in office that fall within the outer perimeter of their official responsibilities as president, unless they have first been both impeached and convicted by the House of Representatives and Senate.

He is arguing that all of the acts he is alleged to have committed fall within this absolute immunity. This view, as the motion filed Thursday makes clear, is deeply rooted in bedrock legal principles, in caselaw, in the Constitution, and in actual practice dating back centuries.

In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court ruled that a president has absolute immunity from civil liability for acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities. In short, you cannot sue a former president personally because his official acts harmed you. This is an unquestioned Supreme Court precedent, based on very serious, core separation of powers concerns.

If a president were susceptible to civil suit for his official acts, the court held that this would raise unique risks to the functioning of government in light of the singular importance of the Presidents duties. The purpose of presidential immunity, in the Fitzgerald courts view, is to prevent concerns about being sued clouding the presidents judgment and crippling his ability to act. Presidents need to be able to discharge their duties to the best of their abilities without having to worry about being hauled into court when their terms expire.

In fairness, this well-established immunity doctrine has never been tested in the criminal context, for the simple reason that no president has been subjected to the sort of relentless prosecutions that President Trump has now been faced with, but the motion persuasively argues that the reasoning in Fitzgerald should still apply, noting for example that judicial immunity, which is structurally similar, applies in both criminal and civil contexts.

This view is also rooted in the actual text of the Constitution. The impeachment clause of Article I provides that, although impeachment proceedings do not themselves carry a punishment beyond removal from office, a party convicted after impeachment, shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

By specifying that a president impeached and convicted could be subject to indictment, etc., the Constitution plainly and clearly implies that absent impeachment and conviction a president cannot be criminally prosecuted for his official acts. Democrats impeached President Trump twice, and on both occasions the Senate acquitted him. Absent a conviction at an impeachment trial, presidential immunity applies to all of President Trumps acts that fall within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, and for these acts at least he cannot be prosecuted.

If we accept that presidential immunity applies in the criminal context, the key question is whether the acts that underlie President Trumps indictment in D.C. fall within this outer perimeter of his official responsibilities as president. I think the answer is clearly yes.

First, it is very important to note that in the context of assessing immunity, the motive of a president is irrelevant. Why the president did something is immaterial; the question is what the president is alleged to have done and whether those acts were within this very broad outer perimeter of his official responsibilities. And because the scope of presidential authority and of presidential responsibilities is so vast, the catchment of presidential immunity is similarly expansive.

When you actually review the alleged acts that underlie the D.C. indictment, my view is that each and every one clearly falls within the outer perimeter of President Trumps official responsibilities. These acts include:

Remember, for the purposes of assessing the scope of immunity, intent and veracity/falsity are irrelevant. Your views on whether President Trumps views on the election were accurate are irrelevant. Your views on why President Trump did what he did are irrelevant. If the acts themselves were presidential acts, falling within the outer perimeter of presidential responsibilities, they cannot form the basis for a criminal prosecution of President Trump, because presidential immunity applies.

As a result, since the entire indictment in the D.C. case against President Trump is predicated on acts like these that he is immune from prosecution for, the case should be dismissed.

Lastly, one final note on timing: Any denial of this motion to dismiss, or any similar motion in Georgia, is likely immediately appealable, as is the case in where congressional legislative immunity is implicated. This means, depending on how long it takes Judge Chutkan to rule, this issue could be before the D.C. Circuit and potentially the Supreme Court before long.

In the meantime, an immunity argument like this one compels a stay of all proceedings, as would be the case in almost any action where immunity forms a potential basis for the avoidance of trial.

Will Scharf is a former federal prosecutor, who also worked on the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He is currently a Republican candidate for Missouri Attorney General.

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4 Things To Know About Trump's Presidential Immunity Defense - The Federalist

Ive been writing about Denver-area baker Jack Phillips for over a decade now. Its clear to me hes going to be badgered into the grave by authoritarians intent on punishing him for thought crimes. From the first time his name appeared in the news until this day, the media have misled the public about him, about the case, and about the law.

The latest chapter in Phillips Kafkaesque saga involves a transgendered lawyer named Autumn Scardina, who demanded Phillips create a pink cake with blue frosting to help celebrate a gender transition. As expected, Phillips, whod already spent years fighting government coercion, refused to participate.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission agreed that Scardina had been discriminated against as a transgendered person. Then, the dishonorable A. Bruce Jones of the Second Judicial District upheld the commissions flagrant attack on free expression. Now, the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.

The entire case is built on ludicrous contortions of logic and law. The Colorado Court of Appeals, for instance, ruled in favor of Scardina, contending that the colors pink and blue arent really speech because, in and of themselves, they arent expressive of anything. The message, says the court, is generated by the observer.

Yes. Because Phillips isnt a complete idiot, he understands that context matters. The color white has no inherent meaning, either. If a known Klansman asks a tailor to fit him for some white sheets, it definitely does.

Then again, if you believe Scardina just happened to approach the most famous Christian baker in the country to create a transition cake the day after the Supreme Courts Masterpiece ruling was dropped in 2017, youre certainly an idiot. The entire Scardina episode, including the configuration of the cake using colors but no words was calibrated to set Phillips up.

In the initial complaint to the Civil Rights Commission, Scardina claimed to be stunned by Phillips rejection. It should be noted, because it isnt in any of todays media coverage, that Phillipss lawyers had very good reason to suspect Scardina, whose name appeared on a caller ID, first requested an image of Satan smoking marijuana. Later, an email was sent to the shop requesting a three-tiered white cake with a large figure of Satan, licking a [nine-inch] black Dildo that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.

Then again, Scardina admitted it was a setup. As Associated Press reported last year, according to the activists lawyer, She [sic] called Phillips Masterpiece Cakeshop to place the order after hearing about the courts announcement because she [sic] wanted to find out if he really meant it It was more of calling someones bluff.

There was no bluff to call. Phillips isnt going to create cakes to celebrate gay weddings or gender transitions or the grand openings of strip clubs or bawdy bachelor parties or for a happy divorce! or any other event that undermines his faith. And even if he was the biggest hypocrite in all of Christendom which he most certainly isnt it wouldnt change anything. Americans dont have to justify their free expression to anyone.

Scardina claims the lawsuit was intended to challenge the veracity of Phillips claim that he would serve LGBTQ customers.This is the central lie of the case. Phillips never once refused to sell a gay couple or a transgender person or anyone else anything in his store. But Phillips isnt Autumn Scardinas servant, and the government has no right to compel him to endorse or participate in any lifestyle.

Speaking of which, the media keeps contending that Phillips is looking for a religious carve out in anti-discrimination law or something along those lines. No such thing exists. It is unclear if the people who write those words are unfamiliar with the First Amendment or just instinctively dismiss it, but religious liberty and free expression are explicitly protected by law. Anything that infringes on those rights is the carve out, not the other way around. If anti-discrimination laws dictate that the government can compel Americans to express ideas they disagree with, as Colorado does, then anti-discrimination laws need to be overturned, tout de suite.

At this point, the best-case scenario is for Phillips case to reach SCOTUS, so the court can either repair the Masterpiece decision which basically provided the state and activists with a guidebook on bullying people of faith (basically, dont show public animosity while doing it) or shelve the First Amendment.

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Authoritarian Thugs Continue Their Persecution Of Jack Phillips - The Federalist

Should Donald Trump even be allowed on the ballot in 2024?

Some of the countrys most prominent legal experts, and a small number of activists and politicians, argue he shouldnt and some have filed lawsuits trying to strike Trumps name from ballots.

Yet most in the Democratic Party are keeping a wary distance from the effort. And other experts argue that such actions, intended to save American democracy, might in fact imperil it even further.

The argument for disqualifying Trump hinges on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, and its proponents argue that its plain language disqualifies Trump, who they say engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution, from holding office again.

Some go so far as to argue that secretaries of state should simply declare Trump ineligible and take him off their ballots but so far, none have been willing to do so. Instead, then, the hunt is on to find a judge who will do it.

To be clear: It seems extremely unlikely that Trump actually will be disqualified, since the Supreme Court will get the final say over any challenge, and theyll likely nix this whole endeavor.

Yet the very existence of the effort raises difficult questions about how a democracy should deal with the threat of a candidate like Trump, who retains a good deal of popular support, but who attempted to steal the 2020 election and talks constantly about having his political opponents imprisoned.

A Trump win in 2024 would be deeply dangerous for American democracy. Yet taking away voters option to choose him would pose its own perils. It would inevitably be seen as blatant election theft by much of the country which would trigger responses, both from Republicans in office and Trump supporters on the ground, that could degrade democracy even more severely.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, just after the Civil War, and was meant to deal with its fallout. Some of its provisions were later used as the foundation of modern civil rights law. Section 3 is about a different topic: whether former insurrectionists can hold public office. Its relevant text is as follows:

No person shall hold any office, civil or military, under the United States who, having previously taken an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, some law professors began suggesting that this meant that Trump, and other Republicans whom they viewed as complicit in the insurrection, should be barred from office.

Liberal advocacy groups took up the charge in 2022, suing unsuccessfully to try to get Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and three Arizona Republican candidates taken off the ballot. Their arguments did prevail in one case, though: A New Mexico judge removed County Commissioner Couy Griffin from his post. (Unlike Greene, Griffin had unlawfully entered the Capitol on January 6 and had been convicted of trespassing.) That marked the first successful use of Section 3 since 1919.

This was all warmup to taking on Trump. This August, law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen released a 126-page forthcoming law review article on Section 3. They concluded, after a year of studying the topic, that Section 3 sets out a sweeping disqualification standard that excludes Trump and potentially many others from holding office.

The article got enormous attention, in part because Baude and Paulsen are conservatives, and because it was quickly endorsed by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig, two of the countrys biggest legal names. Steven Calabresi, a founder and co-chair of the board of the Federalist Society, also initially said he was convinced though he changed his mind a month later.

Baude and Paulsen also raised eyebrows for arguing that, per their legal analysis, state election officials should act to take Trump off the ballot now rather than waiting for Congress or judges to do it. Section 3 is self-executing, they argue, so state officials need to obey it.

Democratic secretaries of state have not taken the initiative, though, saying this is a matter for the courts. And with a few exceptions Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) recently opined that Trump is disqualified from running most Democratic politicians have kept a wary distance from this effort.

As much as the party fears and loathes Trump, there is an evident concern that striking him from the ballot would be going too far. Either due to a commitment to democracy, a fear of the explosive backlash that would follow such a move, or a desire to make the effort look less partisan, Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson are saying that its out of their hands, try the courts instead.

So now the hunt is on to find a judge who will declare Trump ineligible to be president. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a longtime progressive advocacy group, has filed suit in Colorado, where a judge has said she hopes to rule on Trumps eligibility by Thanksgiving. Free Speech for People, another progressive advocacy group, has filed suit in Minnesota.

Even before this came lawsuits from Texas tax attorney John Anthony Castro, who is, at least officially, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Shortly after he registered to run, he filed a lawsuit citing Section 3 to try and get Trump taken off the ballot. Hes since filed similar suits in more than a dozen other states, and constantly hypes up his effort on the website formerly known as Twitter (They finally realized Im not fu**ing around. Too late, beta boys, he wrote recently). The Supreme Court recently declined to take up one of Castros appeals, but his other suits are still alive for now.

Still, the Supreme Court is the ultimate destination for all of this wrangling, and it has a six-justice conservative majority, three of whom were appointed by Trump. Even before getting into the legal specifics, thats enough reason to be deeply skeptical that the Court would ban Trump from running again.

The legal debates here can be abstruse. They feature attempts to divine the intent of politicians during the 1860s, discussions on how seriously to take an 1869 circuit court opinion by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, and slippery slope hypotheticals about how disqualification could later be abused in different situations.

So lets zoom out and ask the real question at the heart of all this: Would disqualifying Trump from the ballot in this way be a good idea, or would it be its own sort of affront to democracy?

Many democracies have struggled with the question of how to deal with a threat to democracy rising through the electoral system, and there are no easy answers. I spoke with Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who just co-authored a book, Tyranny of the Minority, on the USs democratic crisis, about the options.

Ziblatt noted Hans Kelsen, an Austrian legal theorist in the 1930s, who he said made the case that if you really believe in democracy, you have to be willing to go down on a sinking ship and come back another day. In Kelsens view, the only defensible solution to authoritarians rising in the democratic system is to beat them at the ballot box.

With the rise of the Nazis, that thinking obviously didnt age well, said Ziblatt. I think thats naive, he said. This idea that we need to just stand by and let our democracy come under assault and hope everything will work out it turned out not to work out.

So the post-World War II German constitution set up a procedure and a legal framework by which certain politicians or parties deemed dangerous to the constitution could be restricted from running for office. Its a very complex and highly regulated procedure, said Ziblatt involving federal and state offices, a bureaucracy, court approval, and necessary legal steps because disqualification is such a potentially dangerous and powerful device.

Other countries have adopted similar approaches, which are known as militant democracy or defensive democracy. The idea is to protect democracy by excluding the threats to it from the political scene.

The thinking is: Trump tried to destroy American democracy in 2020. If hes allowed to try again, theres good reason to suspect hell do more damage. So why not stop him now? Supporters of disqualifying Trump, like Luttig, argue that he disqualified himself. The Constitution says insurrectionists cant hold office, and we have a duty to uphold the Constitution, they claim.

But the problem with the 14th Amendment option, both Levitsky and Ziblatt told me, is that the US did not establish a consistent procedure or institutional authority for excluding candidates after the Civil War. We have no agreed-upon institutional mechanism in place, no electoral authority, no judicial body with precedent and practice that all the major political forces agree should be empowered to make this decision, Levitsky said.

Long-standing institutions and procedures provide credibility; ideally, they help assure the nation that these decisions arent ad hoc, arbitrary, and politicized as they are in many countries. In Latin America, Levitsky says, disqualification is often badly abused to exclude candidates the powers that be simply dont want to win.

In Trumps case, what would look to some like dutifully standing up for the Constitution would look to many others like an unprecedented intervention by elites into the electoral process, based on a disputed interpretation of a 155-year-old, rarely used provision with the clear underlying motivation of preventing voters from making a particular person the president.

Both professors blanched at the idea of partisan secretaries of state taking Trump off the ballot on their own. Levitsky called this deeply problematic, and Ziblatt said it would be very fraught and dangerous and likely to lead to escalation.

Pro-Trump secretaries of state would surely respond with their own disqualifications of Democratic candidates in reprisal. Indeed, Trumps supporters already caused chaos at the Capitol when they wrongly believed the election was being stolen from him, and theyre already disenchanted with American institutions. What if Trump truly was prevented from even running by questionable means? Things can always get worse and more dangerous. Legal commentator Mark Herrmann compared secretaries of state disqualifying Trump to opening Pandoras Box.

Given the lack of precedent, the much healthier path, Levitsky said, would have been if the Republican Party had managed to self-police by convicting Trump during his second impeachment trial and blocked him from running again. They didnt and thats why were in this mess, debating whether democracy can even survive another Trump presidency.

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14th Amendment, Section 3: The debate over taking Trump off the ... - Vox.com

DENVER A popular gay bar in downtown Denver permanently closed its doors this week after city officials failed to address homeless encampments disrupting business.

On Thursday, one of the citys first gay establishments, Triangle Denver, sent a farewell email out to customers explaining doors will open one last time this Sunday before going under for good.

With heavy hearts we announce that, effective immediately, Triangle Denver is closing indefinitely thanks primarily to the ever-expanding encampments which have surrounded and suffocated the businesses in our neighbourhood, the email reads.

The bar cited a customer survey of more than 500 patrons, in which 75 percent reported visiting less frequently this year compared to last year. Nearby homeless camps were named as customers largest complaint, with more than 60 percent saying safety concerns discouraged them from repeat visits.

The city cleared out the disruptive encampments on Sept. 27.

For one single afternoon, we had our neighbourhood back, the email read. Less than 24 hours later, camps returned, and despite our pleas, have seen no action from the city to stop the re-entrenchment. We cant ask our guests or staff to continue to endure this health and safety nightmare. Our well of patience and resources has run dry.

A local ABC affiliate reported in August that nearby businesses on the same block are feeling under siege as homeless encampments now surround them on three sides. Sales for Triangle Denver dropped 40 percent over the summer.

Scott Coors, the bars owner, blamed incompetent city leadership for the closure claiming city hall has dragged its feet at every turn when asked to deal with the encampments.

We are disappointed and frustrated with the lack of urgency with which the mayors office is addressing the protracted public health and safety crisis downtown, Coors told The Federalist. Tents block sidewalks and parking areas our customers formerly used to access our establishment. They no longer feel safe or comfortable leaving their cars and walking to and from our entrance especially at night when we have the bulk of our business, and I dont blame them.

Mentally unstable individuals, rampant and openly observable methamphetamine and heroin use, human waste on sidewalks, and verbal and physical violence is common, Coors added.

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'Safety Nightmare': Homeless Camps Shut Down Denver Gay Bar - The Federalist