Author and lawyer Tristan Snell points out that SCOTUS, and everyone else, shouldn’t try to hide behind the declaration Let the voters decide!, because, well, they already have:
Fortunately, the Supreme Court need not look far for answers to these questions. They can simply look across the street at the Capitol, where majorities of both chambers of Congress already found that January 6 was an insurrection and that Trump not only engaged in it but “incited” it.
This may come as a shock. When, one might ask, did Congress ever hold such votes?
Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”
This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense — and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court. Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent. [CNN/Opinion]
