Oath-Breaking Insurrectionist Dogs 

BEST-LAID PLANS:  I fully intended to close out 2023 on a light and larky note for a year that has been anything but. As usual, reality intruded. The plan was to write an ersatz news story reporting how Santa Barbara’s comically beleaguered mayor, Randy Rowse — played to perfection by Spencer Tracy in a yuletide comedy yet to be made — declared a state of astrological emergency because Mercury presently finds itself in retrograde. Accordingly, the mayor would earnestly enjoin residents from driving heavy farm equipment or making major life decisions while he desperately sought emergency federal funding to offset the loss of Christmas revenues local merchants would suffer. Tenant rights activists would push for a freeze on evictions and rent hikes. Restaurant owners would demand more time for their parklets. And the rest of us would continue saying and doing the same thing we always have. 

For the record, Mercury has, in fact, been in retrograde since December 13 and will remain so ’til the end of the year. It happens four times a year, each time for 21 days. According to those in the know, retrograde is a treacherous and tricky time when noses are prone to get terminally out of joint, and when things will get taken in the worst of ways. It’s when friends cut each other off and romance curdles. It’s the law of physics Sir Isaac Newton never got around to discovering.

Or maybe he did but kept it under his apple-bonked hat.

Allegedly being a reporter, I felt the need to do a little legwork. I called Serena Carroll, an astrologer-therapist for more than 35 years who, among many things, used to write for the Independent. The danger in reporting is that new facts present themselves; stories shift course. Carroll, endowed with one of those warm and breezy laughs that make everyone an instant co-conspirator, noted how men invariably wanted to know when they were going to die, something women, she said, never asked about. I wrote that down. But absolutely everybody, Carroll added, wanted to know if Trump would win in 2024. 

“He’s not going to be president,” she stated with zero equivocation. “He’s going down, down, down.” Was he going to die before the election, I asked. “No, he’s going to be around for his humiliation,” she said. Vladimir Putin, she added for good measure, was also in for a very rough year.

Naturally, I found myself morally torn whether to report this. Would such a revelation engender an ill-deserved sense of complacency among voters? Would they not bother voting? And if Trump won, would it be my fault?

The answer, of course, is yes. That’s the value of a Catholic-school education. Everything is your fault.

As I mulled how to stretch this into an entire column, I harassed anyone I could find in the Independent offices with Christmas trivia. Had they heard Joseph was legally entitled to stone Mary to death because they were not married when she was pregnant with Jesus? That Jesus was a bastard? “Of course,” they all said, rolling their eyes and blowing their hair. “Didn’t you?”

Actually no. That, too, is a benefit of a
Catholic-school education. They tell you only what they want you to know. 

Then lightning struck in the Rocky Mountain State, and Serena Carroll’s prediction glimmered with the first vibrations of truth. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump’s name could not appear on that state’s primary election ballot because Trump was not a qualified candidate. 

To be qualified in Colorado, Trump has to be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen, and a resident of the United States for at least 14 years. There is one other detail. And it’s not small. Trump can’t have engaged in an insurrection against of the United States as outlined in Section III of the 14th Amendment and still qualify for the Colorado ballot. And by a vote of 4-3, the seven Supreme Court Justices — yes, all appointed by Democratic governors — concluded Trump had actively engaged in an insurrection by inciting the well-orchestrated and well-armed MAGA flash mob to storm the bastille of the U.S. Capitol to thwart the peaceful transfer of power back on January 6. 

In making that finding, the justices relied heavily upon a five-day trial — with 15 witnesses — held by a Colorado lower court to determine Trump’s level of responsibility in that attack. There was much hair splitting over whether to call it an insurrection, a riot, or a rebellion. The justices finally arrived at: “An organized and armed uprising against the authority or operations of government.” They would conclude, “Under any viable definition, this constituted an insurrection.” Trump, they would conclude, is “an oath-breaking insurrectionist.” For good measure, the Colorado majority quoted a line from former Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote that you didn’t have to wield the club or hold the gun to be guilty. “In treason,” he would write, “there are no accessories.”

The 14th Amendment, by the way, was drafted right after the Civil War. Its goal was to exclude Confederate office holders who had once sworn allegiance to the United States from ever holding political office again. Its other goal — coincidentally — was to redefine Black people, for purposes of drawing district boundaries, as whole human beings. Prior to that, the Constitution counted them as three-fifths of a person. 

This, of course, is a cataclysmically huge deal. As with everything involving Donald Trump, it’s unprecedented. Naturally, it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where legal microsurgery will be performed on the meaning of such words as “engage in” or “officer,” as in whether or not the President qualifies as an “officer of the United States.” Whether the patient survives or not will soon be seen. In the meantime, Serena Carroll gets major points in my book for pulling the astrological equivalent of an inside straight. And in the meantime, we’ll always have Paris.

Merry Christmas.