The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

IT looks like history may be about to repeat itself in the US presidential election. A Colorado Supreme Court decision on Tuesday makes it quite likely that, as in 2000, the highest American court will be obliged to issue a decision that could determine the outcome of next year’s vote.

This all started when then-US president Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, incited a mob of his supporters to assault the US capitol and interrupt a ceremonial vote count that would confirm the election of his opponent Joe Biden. Everyone reading this can recall the shocking televised images of the subsequent mayhem at the citadel of the world’s most formidable democracy.

The avowed purpose of all this sedition was to retain Trump as the American president, in defiance of the fair election of its citizenry.

Could the actions of Trump and his mob be characterized as insurrection?

Can there be any doubt that the answer to that question is yes? We all saw it with our own eyes.

For most American voters, no amount of evasive verbiage and outright prevarication from Trump and his timid, venal band of supporters in the media and in his own, wholly-owned Republican Party can change that.

For Trump’s dedicated supporters, whether or not it was insurrection is not the point. The point is to assure their own return to political power in Washington, with all its attendant rush and renewed access to great wealth and influence in what has become a thoroughly corrupted political process that presides over the world’s most vibrant, wealthy economy.

If the situation were reversed, would Democrats behave any differently? That’s actually a good question. But since the current president’s behaviour in no way resembles Trump’s conduct in and out of office, that point is moot for now.

In the three years since Trump’s insurrection, we have seen a skillfully staged Democrat-led congressional investigation that clearly implicated Trump in insurrection. We have also witnessed a laboriously crafted federal case against Trump led by special prosecutor Jack Clark.

If America is really guided by the rule of evidence and law, Trump is toast. But wait. Law is research and words. Trump has over many years hired a full regiment of crafty lawyers to defend his outrageous, often illegal-seeming behaviour. He has been successful.

Now there is a new challenge. And it seems certain to be adjudicated by the US Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the Democrat-majority Colorado Supreme Court affirmed a state district judge’s opinion that Trump’s actions before and on January 6, 2021, constituted engaging in insurrection, and that courts had the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th amendment of the US constitution against a person whom Congress had not specifically designated – in this case, Trump.

“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the Colorado justices wrote. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado secretary of state to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” a four-justice majority wrote, with three justices dissenting. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favour, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

The dissenting justices didn’t necessarily agree that Trump is not guilty of insurrection. Their objections were mostly procedural, as had been the views of justices on several other state supreme courts that have already declined to issue such a stark judgment on Trump’s behaviour.

The US Supreme Court will almost certainly have to take this case, and if they uphold the Colorado judgment, Trump will probably have to be removed from the GOP primary ballot across the country. No one knows anything for sure in all of this. It’s never happened before.

In 2000, the US Supreme Court had to intervene to decide the presidential election contest between George W Bush and Al Gore. That issue involved the vote in Florida, now reliably red but still at that time a “swing state” whose voter preference was uncertain prior to major elections.

But Bush and Gore were in many ways the same person. Each was the son of a political scion, raised and nurtured in political power and sufficient wealth, educated at Yale and Harvard, their success in life virtually guaranteed unless they erred catastrophically. Neither was, nor would likely have been, anything special as president.

Want some evidence of that? How about this: Bush accepted stupendously misguided advice and launched a pointless, costly and ultimately failed war against Iraq early in his administration, perhaps trying to emulate his father’s successful but wisely more limited campaign against the same adversary twenty years earlier.

And Gore, while vice-president 30 years ago, instituted a silly, duplicitous federal budgetary cost-cutting exercise that compelled the US to decommission and dismantle the symbolically effective counter-drug aerostat balloon programme here in The Bahamas. These budget cuts were mostly designed to buttress Gore’s own eventual presidential candidacy, but caused some real harm here and elsewhere.

Now, on the eve of the Iowa GOP caucuses next month, the runaway front-runner for the Republican nomination for president may suddenly be yanked from ballots across the country. In 2000, the Supreme Court admitted that its prompt decision was necessary to stave off precisely the kind of confusion and chaos that Trump stimulated twenty years later.

The high court, now firmly conservative but far from fawningly Trumpian, may decide to allow similar considerations to temper and perhaps influence its decision on whether to take the case (most feel they will) and perhaps issue a ruling that might surprise us.

It will all be highly dramatic. It might even be really, really important.

Opportunistic Maduro taking advantage of Guyana while US distracted with wars

It’s about 1,800 miles from Nassau to Georgetown, Guyana. That’s about the same distance as from Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, or from Miami to Minneapolis. So Nassau and Georgetown aren’t exactly neighbours. How concerned should we be if our CARICOM allies in Guyana are threatened by a much larger neighbour?

It’s plausible to believe that this is now happening. The big neighbour is Venezuela, which shares a long border with Guyana and covets oil assets recently discovered in the Caribbean Sea in Guyanese territorial waters but adjoining Venezuelan territorial waters. Indeed, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has advanced claims on some of the Guyanese sea bottom.

This long-simmering dispute is all about oil. Maduro, having implausibly survived dogged but ultimately ineffective efforts by the US to knock him out of power in Caracas, might be forgiven for thinking of himself as the second coming of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

He continues to defy the US. And he continues to remain in power. That combination runs counter to most modern Western Hemispheric history.

Maduro is at least theoretically buttressed by rhetorical support – and sometimes more – from noted American antagonists like Russia, Iran and Cuba. The US is tied up in political knots over how to deal with the unprecedented threat to traditional government represented by Trump.

The Americans are also profoundly distracted by Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the sneaky Hamas attack on southern Israel and resulting Israeli counter-assault.

Maduro might well conclude that this is the perfect time to make a grab for the Guyanese oil. But most experts doubt there will be a Venezuelan invasion, even though the mercurial Maduro doesn’t always act the way the experts think he will.

Furthermore, Maduro and Guyanese president Irfan Ali met last week in St Vincent and the Grenadines to forswear war.

Maduro, likely still deciding whether invading his neighbour is worth the risk, alleges that an 1899 decision by the British unfairly took about two thirds of what is now Guyanese territory from Venezuela and allotted it to Guyana. (Present-day Guyana was a British colony until independence was granted in 1966),

Traditional territorial irredentism also undergirded similar military adventures by Iraq against Kuwait in 1990 and by Argentina against the Falkland Islands in 1982. Putin’s current war against Ukraine is based upon similar premises.

Those actions also surprised most of the “experts”.