A Colorado Christmas Miracle!
By booting the GOP front-runner off the Colorado ballot, four Dem-appointed justices validated Trump's narrative: Democrats are the true "enemies of democracy" and will stop at nothing to destroy him.
Growing up in Nebraska, I viewed Colorado as one of the majestic dominions of the original Nebraska Territory, which also included Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Its size dwarfed any other U.S. state, including California. Its capital was known as Omaha City.
For most of its history, Colorado hued to the values of the Nebraska Territory: hard work, discipline, self-effacement, personal responsibility, courage, indomitable grit, with a dash of stay-out-my-business Libertarian cussedness (see: Hunter S. Thompson). Gifted with a high plains terrain suited for sundry ag pursuits, mining, oil, coal, and gas exploration, not to mention hiking and skiing, Colorado became the all-year playground for businessmen of means, and speculators who sought to become them.
Over time, denizens of other less properly formed burgs discovered The Centennial State, bringing with them their bicoastal values. Bucolic, humble, earthy, and cosmic mountain getaways like Aspen and Telluride became littered with Northeast hedge fund swells, SoCal film and TV narcissists, and SF Bay Area technorati, destroying, as tourists do, what they seek. The city of Boulder, which once hosted the groovy Holy Man Jam and, in 1987, The Monks of Monk: The Mobile Magazine, descended into steady-state dysfunction––its streets littered with junkies, homeless, and mentally ill. Denver remained largely unchanged as a kind of simple, friendly, workmanlike tree desert. Its greatest claim to fame was that it was home to one of the signature icons of modern American prose, Neal Cassady (nee Dean Moriarty). Its darkest chapter: the mass shooting at Columbine High School in nearby Littleton.
By the late oughts, the vibe changed in the Mile High City too, as Big Tech––increasingly priced out of Silicon Valley––discovered the Denver/Boulder area. Concomitant with that sea change came the state’s second gold rush. In a 2012 referendum, Coloradoans voted to legalize weed come January 2014. The Denver/Boulder metro area became ground zero for cannabis dispensaries, pot tourism, and the broader legal drug craze. With the sudden influx of under-30s in search of their own Rocky Mountain High, the ability to separate fact from fantasy––the hallmark of common-sense Midwestern burgs––drifted coincidentally to the wayside. Formerly buoyed by traditional bulwarks of conservativism such as the Air Force Academy and Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, the former GOP-leaning swing state voted for progressive Barack Obama for President in 2008. Lauren Bohbert and Ken Buck notwithstanding, Colorado has trended leftward ever since.
This past week’s gobsmacking Colorado Supreme Court ruling booting Donald Trump off the state’s ballot is only the latest chapter in the surreal Californication of Colorado, though it’s fast becoming its most notorious. By a 4-3 vote, the court disqualified the former president ostensibly based on section 3 of the 14th amendment, which was primarily designed to prevent Confederate military and civilian leaders who’d taken up arms against the U.S. government––and who had occupied U.S. territory––from running for office again. The TDS-afflicted, Ivy-educated, Dem-appointed court majority cited Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, as grounds for disqualification, even though Trump, acting within his rights to dispute an election––as Democrats did en masse against Trump in 2016 and in several previous elections––urged his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically.”
Trump was never indicted for, charged with, or convicted of insurrection, let alone “inciting insurrection.” The Colorado court’s view of his conduct is merely an opinion unsupported by a trial or formally introduced evidence. I might have an opinion that Rep. Maxine Waters was guilty of insurrection when she rabidly urged her supporters to physically attack Trump Administration officials. I could argue that every Democrat who openly supported and enabled the extremely violent, destructive, and deadly BLM Summer of Insurrection, including Vice President Kamala Harris, is guilty of insurrection. I could posit that the tens of thousands of BLM/Antifa insurrectionists and their enablers should face the same scrutiny and punishment as the January 6 protesters who entered the Capitol, but that does not make them guilty of insurrection until they are charged, tried, and convicted in a court of law. Heck, the decision by Joe Biden and DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas to open the southern border to millions of illegal immigrants is a clear case of insurrection, but, again, without conviction in a trial, it’s just another opinion.
The State Supreme Court’s vote to destroy democracy in order to save it has fed straight into Donald J. Trump’s victim narrative, overtaking the news cycle, and again relegating his GOP opponents to unwitting Trump backers, as they are forced––from Christie to DeSantis to Haley––to admit the obvious: the court’s decision was a bridge too far. It’s a bona fide Christmas Miracle that will keep bleeding swing votes the longer Democrats keep pushing it.
By unconstitutionally denying the franchise to millions of its state's voters, Colorado is now in full sedition against the truth, the Constitution, and America. Even if Trump voters in Colorado write in the former President’s name, the state’s highest court said they will not allow those votes to be counted. Unlike previous illicit Democratic Get Trump gambits––the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, the Steele Dossier lies, the FISA court abuse, the intel chief denials about Hunter’s laptop, the paid State Department censorship of pro-Trump/pro-GOP messaging on Twitter (now X)––their latest anti-democratic maneuver has a simple and clear logic that will make it easier to translate to the swing voters spooked by judicial and governmental overreach.
No surprise that the judicial shot heard around the world has set off a race-to-the-bottom arms race. No longer willing to allow Democrats to run roughshod over due process, privacy, and the Constitution, Republicans are at long last pushing back. Using the same loose and subjective standards of the Colorado Supreme Court as a kind of performative slapback, state representatives in the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania are drafting legislation to remove President Joe Biden from ballots. This will only escalate from here, as dozens of other states work to keep Trump and Biden off the ballot.
The renegade state of Colorado and its lawmakers and justices must be brought quickly and surely to heel. If the U.S. Supreme Court fails to act to end this insanity, federal troops might inevitably be marshaled to quell the mounting strife. This is serious stuff. It has happened before. And it did not end well.
In the 1860 election, there were no ballots distributed for Republican presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln in the Southern Democratic states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. As a consequence, Lincoln received zero votes in those ten states, denying him 61 potential electoral votes. Whether Lincoln would have secured many votes in the Democrat slaveholding South is immaterial. The legal voters in those states were denied the franchise by unconstitutional acts of those states.
If Colorado gets its way, it will light the match of a Second American Civil War. As politically helpful as the state court’s decision is for Trump, that match needs to be judicially doused right now, lest we revisit horrors long since passed.