Elie Honig Nukes ‘Cocksure’ Advocates of ‘Doomed’ Trump Ballot Ban from Orbit: ‘Trump Will Reap the Political Windfall’
CNN senior legal analyst and New York Magazine columnist Elie Honig minced no words in his latest for the latter on Monday, ripping into the “cocksure” advocates of the failed attempt to remove Donald Trump from the ballot using the 14th Amendment.
Honig leads by arguing that “it was plain to see from the start that the effort to disqualify” Trump was “doomed to fail” and submitting that its “ironic result” has been to “provide Trump with fuel for his effort to win back the White House.”
But, he says, “you’ll be forgiven if you expected a different result” since “we’ve endured months of cocksure guarantees from leading constitutional scholars that Colorado’s application of the 14th Amendment against Trump was ‘unassailable in every single respect.'” Honig’s first barb was aimed at former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, but more were forthcoming.
“Other thought leaders offered up an ‘amen’ chorus, disparaging any argument that the 14th Amendment might not work as ‘extremely weak’ and ‘just complete nonsense,'” wrote Honig, quoting Laurence Tribe and George Conway, respectively. “Turns out you can’t bludgeon the Constitution into the ground with hyperbolic, conclusory rhetoric.”
He continued to plunge the knife:
In the end, 14th Amendment advocates collectively amassed a record only slightly better than Trump’s (he lost 60 cases, give or take, with only one minor win, in his effort to steal the 2020 election) and slightly worse than the 1899 Cleveland Spiders’ (which won 20 games and lost 134, setting a record for baseball futility that will never be matched). The Supreme Court’s ruling today was no outlier. Dozens of 14th Amendment challenges to Trump had already been rejected in state and federal courts across the country. Only Colorado (by a 4-3 ruling from seven state justices, all appointed by Democratic governors), Illinois, and Maine (by a unilateral finding of the secretary of state, who is neither a judge nor a lawyer) ever gave the 14th Amendment any traction.
“It’s not often we see Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on the same page as justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, but the 14th Amendment challenges were so obviously flawed that they ended up creating a cross-ideological consensus,” observed Honig.
“Now the results are in, and Trump will reap the political windfall,” concluded Honig. “Trump’s on the 2024 ballot, just as he would’ve been without the 14th Amendment detour. He and his supporters surely will rally around a failed effort by a bunch of Northeastern, elitist law-professor types to use the courts to deny the American voters a choice and to take out the Republican front-runner. This is one of Trump’s unique political gifts: He inspires such visceral hatred in his opponents that he provokes them to self-destruct.”
Prior to the release of the opinion, Honig had sparred with Conway on CNN, who had responded contemptuously to Honig’s arguments against disqualification, dismissing them as “bogus,” “pathetically weak,” “useless,” and, as Honig recalled in his column, “complete nonsense.”
“It’s just not that hard, Elie,” declared Conway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”
