Laurence Tribe on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision
Laurence Tribe is a law professor at Harvard specializing in the US Constitution. But leftism and partisan Trump-hatred so blinds Tribe that he sounds incredibly stupid here.
Maybe he really is incredibly stupid, but I doubt it – at least, not in the intellectual sense. But this is what he says:
So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court, saying there is ample evidence here in a trial which was fully fair and applied constitutionally appropriate standards, ample evidence to disqualify this oath breaking insurrectionist.”
He added, “In other words, they could’ve gone in either of two directions and there’s only one possible region reason for going in the direction they did. That was that they were doing a favor to oath breaking insurrectionists, in particular, one Donald J. Trump. That is not the way a court should behave. Yes, in a 100 years from now, that is still going to be a lesson in how court should not decide cases. It will be a lesson in how a court by a 5-to-4 decision can fundamentally destroy the Constitution’s deliberate protection against office holding by oath breaking insurrectionists.”
This was not a 5-4 decision, and it is purposely misleading to say it was. The judgment was 9-0. Four justices concurred with the other five, writing two separate concurring opinions as to their reasons.
But there is also a fundamental problem with other parts of Tribe’s assertion, such as this: “So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court …”
How does giving a single state court the power to do that have the result of preventing other states from doing it, or preventing some states from banning Trump and others from banning Biden? As far as I can see, what he writes there is nonsensical. And that’s even before you consider other issues such as who does have the power to declare a person an insurrectionist and what criteria should be used. What did the 14th Amendment intend?
And yet, as I said, I don’t think Tribe is stupid. I think he is blinded by his hatred of Trump, so blinded that he convinces himself of nonsensical things. He is not alone, either. He lives in a bubble in which there is plenty of ideological agreement with him and he is lauded for his views.
Tribe has had a lot of practice, too:
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'”
A different definition for “stupid” is needed.
It’s amazing the bizarre rhetorical contortions that many of these lefty intellectuals go through in order to advocate for insanity and defend the indefensible. My guess is that their purpose is just to make some kind of an argument, any kind. It doesn’t really matter if the argument is absurd, nonsensical, illogical, or contradictory. It’d be nice if it was a good argument, but ultimately that’s not the point really.
The point is just that an argument is made. That way, it gives Liberals something to point to, some sort of ammunition. Since a lot of people out there won’t ever listen to and analyze the argument itself, it might work as a sort of default win in a discussion. As in “Look, this Laurence Tribe guy said a bunch of stuff about how the Supreme Court is wrong here. He’s a Harvard Law Professor! Plus he uses big words and stuff so he’s gotta be right, right?”
…I don’t think Tribe is stupid. I think he is blinded by his hatred…
Precisely. Tribe is a quintessential case of how intelligent people can sometimes appear dumb. Hatred is not the only emotion that can produce the effect.
Stupid is as stupid does. If you act stupid . . . you’re stupid.
Again, I suspect SCOTUS is smarter than Tribe and can see if accusation without trial is enough to ban people, it is sure enough to ban the criminal donkey party.
This is the same Lawrence Tribe, let’s not forget, who filed an amicus brief for an elephant in the Bronx Zoo, insisting that the elephant led “an intellectually, emotionally, and socially complex life.” He is not unique in being a highly credentialed tendentious jerk.
All you have to do is HATE Trump…and everything makes sense.
(Even if it really doesn’t.)
Phrased differently, everything makes sense—and can be expressed as though it’s clear, sober and logical—as long as it includes Trump hatred (and hatred of those who support him…or do not, themselves, vilify him).
The need—the LUST—to HATE, so widely promoted by the Left, so greatly nourished by the Media, has become a lethal addiction.
In these perverse and crazed times, you are redeemed by it. It has become Virtue personified.
IN fact, all you need is HATE, HATE, HATE….
https://vimeo.com/252765355
(Now where have we seen that before…?)
P.S. Jonathan Turley has a particular disregard for Tribe and his pseudo-intellectual antics, of which Turley is not shy of dissecting, splicing and dicing, all rather entertainingly…even if the corruption of someone as highly placed and highly regarded (by some) as Tribe is no laughing matter.
And a bit more sheer insanity, stunning stupidity…and grotesque ugliness (as though there wasn’t enough of it)…
“Democratic rhetoric takes a perilous turn for the Jews”
https://www.jns.org/democratic-rhetoric-takes-a-perilous-turn-for-the-jews/
Opening graf:
“In an appearance this week on MSNBC, veteran Democratic political strategist James Carville made a stunning statement. Speaking of the uncommitted vote in Michigan, Carville said that it will be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault if Biden loses the election in November….
Always useful to have someone to blame….though.
Still, curious folks might want to ask, if Bibi will be responsible for Biden’s defeat in November, then would he then be considered responsible for helping to save America?
Speaking of perversity, here’s a rather sinister twist—an idea that could ONLY HAVE BEEN thought up by those Patriots(TM) who’ve hijacked the country….
“Retired Army Colonel Warns Against ‘Courage To Serve’ Act That Would Allow Migrants To Obtain Citizenship By Joining The Military Amid Shortage Of ‘White Americans’ Enlisting”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2024/03/05/retired-army-colonel-warns-against-courage-to-serve-act-that-would-allow-migrants-to-obtain-citizenship-by-joining-the-military-amid-shortage-of-white-americans-enlisting/
IrishOtter49 (4:06 pm) has it right:
“Stupid is as stupid does. If you act stupid . . . you’re stupid.”
When my children were young, I often found myself counseling them,
“anyone who bothers to argue with an idiot *is* one.”
Were I confronted by Laurence Tribe, my own counsel would kick in.
we’ve been dealing with serpent head for more than 30 years now, lets recall obama was one of tribe’s leading pupils, such as that term applies, at this point he’s a knave not a fool, this happened long ago, Carville says he opposes the woke, because they make the democrats look bad, but thats what he endorsed in 2020, just as with Bill Maher ‘who would vote for Biden’s head in a jar’ same guys says Newsom has done fine, I guess the closest analogy is to the walkers in the zombie series,
they destroy lives and reputations, from Gascon my paisan sadly, to Bragg to Willis to Graves, there’s an ironic name,
I get tired of charges for non crimes, funny how no chose to charge Lauer or Rose, or Moonves, they worked in New York, Bragg dragging out a 17 year old tape, that clearly tells you what the behavior was like in that era, this was before we knew about Epstein and Weinstein that is the context of the tape, and the reaction of the participants,
The antidote to Tribe’s embarrassing attempts at analysis:
“Supreme Court’s 9-0 Election Decision Is About The Constitution, Not Trump Or Biden”—
https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/05/the-supreme-courts-9-0-decision-was-not-about-trump-or-biden-but-the-constitution/
H/T Powerline blog.
Barry Meislin
I am reminded of Tom Leher’s introductory patter to National Brotherhood Week
Speaking of Tribe, IIRC there was some quantum psychobabble, unintentionally reminiscent of Sokal, that he co-authored with Barack Obama.
Update of Obama-Tribe quantum psychobabble:
The Obama-Tribe ‘Curvature of Constitutional Space’ Paper is Crackpot Physics
One should take Professor Tribe’s pontifications on law as seriously as Krugman’s or Olbermann’s pontifications on anything.
People have misused “stupid” too much of late. They use it when “fool” is the correct term.
“Stupid” is a failure of intellect.
“Fool” is a failure of wisdom.
As I have noted many many times, if there is a single quality which defines PostModern Liberalism (well, other than “power hungry to an extreme”) it is a near total lack of wisdom.
Many are fools with high IQs. Noam Chompsky is the poster boy for their ilk.
}}} The Relevant Part of the 14th Amendment: shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
This is the problem, here. Trump’s never actually been charged with this, much less convicted of it.
He’s just been name-called it by the merdia in their endless frothing litany of blatantly false accusations.
So, even if you support the notion of doing that to Trump, you’re jumping the gun by juuuuuust a small margin… a Grand Canyon sized “small” margin.
}}} Yes, in a 100 years from now, that is still going to be a lesson in how court should not decide cases.
Pretty damned sure that, 100 years from now, not less than 95% of the cases regarding Trump that have been brought all the way to trial or are preparing to do so, THESE will be the “lessons [in] how a court should not decide cases…” Not anything made by the SCotUS.
as Derrick Bell and Roberto De Unger and the late Charles Ogletree, a quadrangle of category error, (I don’r know if De Unger is still alive), Chomsky crossed the line to knave around the time he whitewashed the Cambodian hecatomb,Year Zero, (I probably would have been blissfully unaware of him if I hadn’t read Destructive Generation by Horowitz, the Whitaker Chambers of the 60s,) notably he zeroed on an obscure monographed where Chomsky compared Reagan to Hitler, I’m not making this up.
If anyone incited insurrrection in that time period it was Barack Obama President Emeritus, in the spring of 2020 he fanned the flames, among the ignorant, if anyone abetted the insurrection it was Kamala Harris with her bail fund, it was Nancy Pelosi, and a cameo role by the shambling strawman Biden, who denied so called Antifa and BLM were a thing, and yet in Schrodinger’s Cat fashion insisted it was wonderful, Same for the Bureau and the Company, with Wray and Haspel at the head of the pyramids,
Fool or Knave? They’re not always mutually exclusive.
Tribe is one of the premier, perhaps *the* premier progressive legal scholar in the country. He is beloved by trendy credentialed (I refuse to say ‘educated’) leftists who are always looking for an ‘expert’ to justify and rationalize their emotive driven social and political creeds.
And Tribe provides. Yes, his argument is barely coherent. That doesn’t matter. It will be gobbled up eagerly by above group, who are his only intended audience. And he knows that.
But I do think he has convinced himself of his own BS to a certain extent. That happens when one is at the top of an ideological bubble, where one’s pronouncements are slavishly repeated back ad nauseum.
So, Tribe is both a fool and a knave
he has a certain use, he was considered too prickly for Clinton to nominate him and by the time Obama, took charge he was the wrong gender
Hate pours voluminously from folks who have those “Hate has no home here” signs in their front yard.
How many young minds has Tribe impacted after a “career teaching constitutional law”? Does Harvard have any checks and balances? Looks like they don’t.
TDS is definitely a mental illness.
Why did not most of the readers here “HATE” Obama? ‘Cause your not mentally ill…
speaking of the bay state
https://twitter.com/LouisLMurrayJr1
He is declaring the Supreme Court of the United States illegitimate.
Hard to read people. But, in person, I get a feeling that some are proud that they BELIEVE, right or wrong, HATE, right or wrong.
So, if that’s correct, they need an object first, then satisfactory arguments second.
How does giving a single state court the power to do that have the result of preventing other states from doing it, or preventing some states from banning Trump and others from banning Biden?
Thank you, Neo! I have heard a lot of analysis of this decision over the last few days (most of it on CNN and not my doing) and I have yet to hear anyone say anything about what a horrible precedent would have been set if the decision went another way.
Tribe has always been a political partisan, not a scholar. See treatments of his work by Stanley Brubaker and Robert Bork.
….cept that there is no way in Hell it COULD HAVE BEEN Constitutional….
If other states aren’t disqualifying candidates for “insurrection” and one does, should the court and the whole country follow that one state’s decision? It’s foolish – stupid even – to think that a different proceeding in another state wouldn’t have reached the opposite verdict, and foolish not to see how politics have influenced the various Trump verdicts around the country. But I guess if you’ve been a tenured/emeritus professor for 50 years you stop considering the possibility that intelligent people could disagree with you in good faith. Tribe’s moment was 30 years or so ago. I don’t think he’s been that important in recent decades, but he lives on in his students and textbook and tweets.
And from the “We-Don’t-Need-No-Steenkeeng-Constitution” File…
“Bombshell Report Alleges Jack Smith Was Unconstitutionally Appointed Special Counsel”—
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bombshell-report-alleges-jack-smith-was-unconstitutionally-appointed-special-counsel/ar-AA1lXbRd
H/T Instapundit.
Doesn’t matter, really. For “Biden” the LAW is just a speed bump…
+ Bonus… (Looks like President Fentanyl-Tranq is going to have to update his name…)
“Much Stronger Than Fentanyl, Nitazene Presents A Looming Crisis”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/much-stronger-fentanyl-nitazene-presents-looming-crisis
It’s what happens when DEMONIZATION is defined as and/or firmly believed to be…VIRTUE…
“Trump lawfare update”—
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2903874/trump-lawfare-update/
H/T Instapundit.
(Hold on. Didn’t we learn that lesson from Adolf and Uncle Joe? Hmmm, guess not…or maybe we just plum fergot…but if so, how?…)
Tribe is aptly named, in at least a couple ways.