Rogue State! Colorado Supremes Knee Cap Donald Trump
The Colorado Supreme Court - all them appointees of Democratic governors - has ruled that Donald Trump cannot appear on the state's presidential ballot, claiming his participation in the January 6th, 2021 "insurrection" disqualified him under the 14th Amendment. Will the latest partisan attack on Trump just make him stronger? Also today: big trouble in little Yemen. And finally: Republican Congressman urges US fight against "communist" Russia...
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report, as you might guess.
Dr. Paul is not in today, so I'll try to do my best and bring you a couple of important stories in the news.
I see there are 150 of you out there watching us live, so thanks very much for watching us live.
Enjoy the chatter and the comments as you go.
There are a few things that are important, and of course, everyone is talking about the Colorado Supreme Court, which has ruled on a four to three basis that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the Colorado ballots.
Now, everyone is talking about this, of course.
All the talking heads are talking about it.
We hope to take a little bit of a different look, obviously, because we're less partisan than most programs are.
But it really is an astonishing ruling.
I think they thought they were hitting a slam dunk.
All seven of the Supreme Court justices on the Colorado Supreme Court are appointed by Democratic governors.
So you see some partisanship.
You see some lawfare involved, perhaps, in the decision.
As we often do, though, we turn to cooler heads.
And let's take a look at the first clip because our old friend Jonathan Turley, who joins us quite often in our conferences and is a good friend of the Institute, he has been very busy breaking this down.
Turley retains a lot of his credibility because he's absolutely not a Trump partisan whatsoever.
He takes a middle ground.
He's an extremist when it comes to the First Amendment, which makes him helpful to all of us.
Now, he has a piece in The Messenger that I'll be quoting from a little bit as we move on.
But here's the tweet he put out about it, which gives you a rundown of his views.
The Colorado Supreme Court has handed down the most anti-democratic opinion in decades.
Yet these justices barred voters from being to vote for their preferred candidate in the name of democracy.
It's like burning down a house in the name of fire safety, he said.
Now let's look at a couple of things from the article that he put out.
He said, even on a court composed entirely of justices appointed by Democratic governors, Colorado Supreme Court split four to three on the question, the majority admitted that this was a case of, quote, first impression and that there was, quote, sparse authority on the question.
Yet, Turley proceeds, the lack of precedent or clarity did not deter these justices from making new law to block Trump from running, he goes on to say.
So essentially what they did is they made the ruling and then they suspended the ruling, as I understand, in lieu of a Supreme Court look at the ruling.
And Jonathan Turley looks very confident, says he's very confident.
The Supreme Court will laugh it out of the ruling.
However, there you have the precedent, and the precedent is very important, regardless of how you feel about Donald Trump.
And that's the point that Turley tried to make.
And in fact, we have a clip of Turley on the Laura Ingram show.
If we can watch that clip, let me see.
I don't know.
Did I say the whole thing?
Yeah, we're going to look at the whole clip of Turley.
It's about a minute or so on Laura Ingram.
And I think he has some good points that he makes, as always.
So let's give him a spin here.
Well, this court just handed partisans on both sides the ultimate tool to try to shortcut elections.
And it's very, very dangerous.
I mean, this country is a powder keg, and this court is just throwing matches at it.
And I think that it's a real mistake, but I think that they're wrong on the law.
You know, January 6th was many things, most of it not good.
In my view, it was not an insurrection.
It was a riot.
That doesn't mean that the people responsible for that day shouldn't be held accountable.
But to call this an insurrection for the purposes of disqualification would create a slippery slope for every state in the Union.
This is a time when we actually need democracy.
We need to allow the voters to vote.
We need to hear their decision.
And the court here just said, you're not going to get that.
In Colorado, we're not going to let you vote for Donald Trump.
And, you know, you could dislike Trump.
You could believe he's responsible for January 6th, but this isn't the way to do it.
I mean, it is, you know, for people that say they're trying to protect democracy, this is hands down the most anti-democratic.
Yeah, so essentially, as you have heard, they use the January 6th insurrection with the fantasy that Trump led the insurrection.
And Turley goes on to point out in his piece later that even special counsel Jack Smith hasn't, he threw everything he could, including a ham sandwich at President Trump, but still was not able to and didn't dare to charge him with being part of an insurrection.
And Turley makes a good point.
He has been critical from the beginning.
He said, but it wasn't an insurrection.
It was a riot.
And in fact, the more we see, you know, we had the release of quite a bit of footage just a few weeks ago we've talked about on the show.
The more we see about what happened on January 6th, the less it looks like an insurrection, and the less it even looks like a full-blown riot.
It looks like a riot in parts.
And as we've also seen, how much of that riot was provoked by U.S. government agents shooting in the crowd in an unprovoked manner.
And that's what recently came out.
We've also seen video of the Capitol Hill Police welcoming the protesters, rioters, insurrectionists, welcoming them into the Capitol, holding doors for them, chatting with them, shaking hands with them.
So this is hardly the stuff if you've ever seen an insurrection or if you've ever seen a revolution, doesn't usually happen this way.
But they have to maintain this front, this image.
They have to maintain the narrative that somehow there was an attempt to steal the elections of 2020.
There may have been, but it certainly didn't happen on January 6th, and that's the case.
But nevertheless, the Supreme Court in Colorado used the 14th Amendment.
As people know, that was an amendment which in part, Clause 3, I guess, stated that if you were fighting on the side of the Confederacy, if you were participating in an act of insurrection against your country, you cannot hold public office.
There are a lot of finer details that we're not going to go into, but clearly irrelevant to the situation.
Nevertheless, they wanted to get their names in the media, I guess, and this is one way they're doing it.
Well, let's return to Turley's piece because there's a couple of more important points that he makes, and he touched on them in the Laura Ingram piece.
Go to the go back one if you can.
I said, now, the only narrow part of the opinion came with the interpretation of the First Amendment, where the four justices dismissed the free speech implications of disqualifying presidential candidates based on political position and rhetoric.
The result is an opinion that lacks any limiting principles.
In this part, I underlined it places the nation on a slippery slope where red and blue states could now engage in tit-for-tat disqualifications.
And I've already seen, by the way, someone calling for Biden to be disqualified in Florida.
So, you really have opened up a can of worms that doesn't bode well whatsoever for the process.
And I think that's why Turley said, you know, we have a powder keg, and they're lighting matches, and I would say putting some gasoline on it as well.
But they talk about you don't have the First Amendment right to say what you want as a candidate.
Well, that's going to be slippery.
If that applies to any politician, they lie on the trail.
That may be worthwhile, in fact.
But let's go to the next one here.
Now, this is the, we'll finish up with Turley.
And he says, Colorado Supreme Court has handed down the most anti-democratic opinion in decades, and he's mentioned that on the show.
So, what's particularly galling is these four justices stripped away the right of millions of voters to choose their preferred candidate in the name of democracy.
And again, he says it's like burning down a house for fire safety.
He said, The only good news is that this flawed theory can now be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where it was likely to be put to rest conclusively.
And I did want to quote: there were three dissenting judges.
Again, all these justices were appointed by Democrat governors, but nevertheless, you still had three dissenting voices.
And Justice Carlos Samore was quoted.
If we can go to that next clip, he was quoted in a zero-hedge piece about it.
And he makes a good point about why he decided to not support the majority in removing Trump's name from the ballot.
He said, Samore similarly wrote that Colorado's election law provides no engine for such a lawsuit, noting that no federal legislation existed to enforce the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause.
And here's a quote from Justice Samore: Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past, dare I say engaged in insurrection, there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.
Procedural due process is one of the aspects of America's democracy that sets this country apart.
And that's a very good point.
He hasn't been proved in a court of law to have been a part of an insurrection.
Indeed, again, as I said earlier, the person who's dogging him at every step of the way, who charged him with something like 91 felonies, has not had the gall to charge him with an insurrection.
Yet, somehow, out of thin air, with no evidence presented, no due process, the Colorado Supreme Court determines that, yes, indeed, he was the leader of this insurrection and therefore is ineligible for the ballot in Colorado.
Very, very dangerous, very stupid move.
But interestingly enough, and this is something that you've heard on this show, as with every one of these moves using lawfare against President Trump, it seems to just make him stronger and more popular.
This will make Colorado's voters even more determined.
If you think the GOP voters in Colorado are going to sit home, some of them may have sat home looking at this, they're going to get out and they're going to vote.
And even Frank Luntz, not one of my favorite people, hates Trump.
Even Frank Luntz recognizes this.
You know, he's the so-called GOP pollster.
And there's a clip, I think we have a video clip of Luntz, again, someone who despises Trump, almost feeling unhappy and sad and angry that they did this because he knows how much it's going to boost Trump when he gets to when he gets to Colorado.
So let's take a listen to, I forget how much of this we're going to listen to, I don't know, a minute or something.
And for more on the political impact, we're joined now by pollster and communication strategist Frank Lunt, who has been getting the polls of Trump voters for years.
So the obvious first question, Frank, what do you think the impact of this ruling will be on their support for him?
It's going to be exactly what the indictments did.
It's going to be exactly what the criticisms have done.
Donald Trump thrives on negativity.
He thrives on legal systems that try to hold him accountable.
And I'm convinced that his polling numbers are going to go up.
Just today, the New York Times published six key swing states that had Donald Trump up beyond the margin of error in five out of the six.
The polling earlier, a month ago, was significant.
Trump is gaining.
The more that he is prosecuted, the more that he is condemned, the higher his numbers go as people rally around him.
And I would say to the judges, as I said to the Justice Department, you're actually making it more likely that Donald Trump is elected next November by how you are pursuing this.
Houthis and the Red Sea Threat00:08:33
Don't explain the same thing.
So we can close it down now.
You can tell Frank Lunt is not happy about this.
He's not wearing his MAGA hat and saying, this is great.
He's saying, this is terrible, you morons.
Do you know what you're doing?
So we'll keep an eye on this.
It's fascinating to watch.
This almost feels like a desperation move on the part of Colorado to do this.
But very serious stuff, and it does not bode well.
Well, we're going to move on to the second thing that we're watching very closely.
And it's an important one, maybe even some ways more important.
You may have noticed this.
I was on the way to work, and I noticed the gas had popped up.
30 cents a gallon from yesterday.
If you're wondering what's happening, well, put on this next clip because this is from Zero Hedge.
Futures slide, Brent jumps back over $80 as Red Sea woes spread.
And what are the Red Sea woes?
Well, the Red Sea woes are that little country of Yemen on the very tip of the peninsula, which controls an extremely strategically important section of the Red Sea, a very narrow section of the Red Sea.
This is the group, the Houthis in Yemen, who fought Saudi Arabia basically to a standstill for eight years.
I think the war lasted.
This is a tiny country, an impoverished country, which fought to a standstill, a very wealthy country equipped with U.S. military equipment.
Well, the Houthis in Yemen are the first and pretty much the only country at this point who stood up for Gaza, stood up for what's happening to the people in Gaza.
And they said, we're not going to allow ships going through the Red Sea that are going to be going to Israeli ports.
We're going to stop them.
And they have all sorts of drones and rockets.
They say that they were supplied by Iran.
Whatever the case may be, they are wreaking havoc.
I mean, this is a classic example of asymmetric warfare when you have the Lilliputians in Yemen who are really tying up the massive U.S. military, the whole shipping of the world.
I think 10% of all shipping goes through the Red Sea.
And you have a U.S. Navy, which looks on paper very formidable, but nevertheless, they have an enormous amount of liabilities when it comes to fighting an asymmetric group, a ragtag group like this, like the Houthis in Yemen.
And I would draw your attention to the next article.
This is from Larry Johnson, who also speaks at Ron Paul Institute conferences.
If you can click this up.
This is also on RonPaulInstitute.org.
We have it up as a lead piece today.
And Johnson makes a very important point.
As a former military person and CIA analyst, the U.S. Navy is unprepared for a prolonged war with Yemen.
Unprepared.
We've got a couple carrier groups in there.
We've got innumerable, you have an Aegis cruiser here shooting off a missile.
You have tons of these in the area.
Nevertheless, you have an enormous amount of danger.
You have shipping stopped.
The major insurance companies are refusing to provide insurance to Israeli ships or ships that will go to Israeli ports.
And insurance for the rest of the ships is very high too.
Go to the next clip.
This is what Larry Johnson is pointing out in his very important article.
He says, tiny Yemen has surprised the West with his tenacity and ferocity in attacking ships trying to ferry containers and fossil fuel and fuel to Israel.
Yes, it's a violation of international law, and the West is fully justified in trying to thwart Yemen.
On paper, it would appear that Yemen is outnumbered and seriously outgunned.
A sure loser, not so fast.
He says the U.S. Navy, which constitutes the majority of the fleet sailing against Yemen, has some real vulnerabilities that will limit its actions.
And he goes on to point out a few of them, which is that the U.S. Navy of today is not the U.S. Navy of before.
They've jettisoned a lot of their original.
He talks about, and I want to go too far into the woods here, but they've decommissioned some of the submarine tenders, all of the repair ships and destroyer tenders, moved away from sailor-manned shore intermediate maintenance centers.
Not only did this eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance over there, but it destroyed the progression of apprentice to journeyman to master technician that made the U.S. Navy sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the military world.
You know, to shorten essentially what he's saying is these ships are high maintenance and they don't have any maintenance people on them.
They rely on going back to port, not only for maintaining the ships, but also for the missiles.
They cannot reload at sea, and it's a big deal.
It's a big problem for them because each of these cruisers, these Aegis cruisers, carries nine missiles.
And these nine missiles are used to shoot down incoming drones, incoming missiles from Yemen.
And as Johnson pointed out in his piece, okay, you've got 90 of these.
After that, you've got to go back, you've got to find a port somewhere and reload.
Well, what if the Houthis shoot 91?
You're able to shoot down 90, that's great.
But what about that 91st?
What about if they do a drone swarm?
Hundreds and hundreds come in.
You're going to have a potentially extremely serious situation in the Red Sea area.
And I want to point out another article.
This is written by a good friend of the Ron Paul Institute's Kelly Flajos, who's over at Responsible Statecraft.
And she points out another important point about what's happening about the U.S. seemingly invincible firepower in the Red Sea.
If you can go to that next clip, she says the cost of fighting Houthis in the Red Sea just went up.
So the U.S., the Pentagon, has got a new task force.
It gave it a spiffy name, Operation.
I forget what it is, but it's something very spiffy sounding.
They've got the Seychelles fighting along with them, so it's going to be very formidable.
But nevertheless, Kelly, as is her want, she's very detailed.
She breaks it down to money.
Let's put this next one up.
This is from Kelly's article and it's very important.
It's also costing the U.S. a pretty penny to act as a key defender of these predominant global shipping lanes.
And this is the part that I underlined.
Each munition used to shoot down the Houthi missiles and drones costs between $1 and $4.3 million, and the ships cannot reload at sea and will have to return to port, perhaps Djibouti, to reload if the kinetic activity goes on much longer, according to experts that talk to responsible statecraft this week.
So we have these enormously expensive weapons.
And don't forget the Houthi shot down a Reaper, a $20 million Reaper drone just about a month or so ago.
So you've got these enormously expensive munitions that are being used to shoot down drones of $5,000 drones, you know, very, very inexpensive equipment.
So you're seeing, I think, in a way, a shift of warfare, a shift to the advantages of asymmetric warfare.
And we've seen a lot of that in Ukraine, by the way, with the use of drones and how they defeated U.S. weapons there.
And the other thing is that the Houthi shooting the missiles are not easy targets.
They're mobile launchers.
They shoot and run, shoot and run.
It's hard to locate them and shoot them down because that's what they did against the Saudis for years and years.
They'd shoot and run.
They'd take out a Saudi airport.
They'd take out Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia.
So it's going to be a very difficult time.
And you have, I don't know how many numbers of U.S. ships, U.S. military ships there.
You sink one or two of them, what's that going to do to the perception of U.S. military invincibility?
So it's a real powder keg.
It's a real danger.
I'm sure there's nothing that Biden and his neocons would like to do more than just take out Yemen, take them down, take out the Houthis.
Not that easy.
The Saudis already tried it.
So we'll keep a very close eye on this, guys.
This is important.
Your gas is going to go up.
You're going to notice it at the pump, and it could get a lot worse.
Republican Congressman's Concerns00:04:38
So I want to move on to one final thing, and this is a short clip that I wanted to put on, and I want to put on to demonstrate, not to pick on this guy, this is a Republican congressman from Georgia.
And I've made the point many times, we've made the point on this show, that members of Congress, there's a misperception that they're extremely well-informed, very inquisitive, very intelligent, and they're on the ball.
Well, unfortunately, that's not the case.
Most often, they're used by special interests, by lobbyists.
They're used to deliver narratives under the auspices of the authority of their positions as elected members of the U.S. legislative body.
So they're used to deliver these messages, but they have no idea what they're talking about.
And so let's put this next clip up because this gentleman is, again, from the state of Georgia.
He is a Republican member of Congress.
I'm going to bring this up.
I'm XI.
And he is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
So this is his committee.
And now let's listen to what do we want?
We want one minute and seven seconds of what Representative McCormick has to say.
I just got back from a conference at the Reagan Library where we had several secretaries of defense.
We had secretaries of state.
We had an amazing array of both Democrats and Republicans.
But every Republican, every Republican, and I'm talking to Republicans right now.
I think this is a really important conversation to have.
Every single former Secretary of Defense I've talked to, all the way back to Reagan, is very much in support of Ukraine.
The strategic outcome of Ukraine will not only impact all of Europe, but also the Far East.
China is paying attention to what's happening there.
They're looking at what they want to do in Taiwan, which would be catastrophic to our chip industry, by the way, because they produce 100% of our AI chips.
It's a strategic corridor where I think 70% of the world's wealth goes through every single day.
It is of strategic essence to keep Ukraine.
First of all, we made a promise, both in the Budapest Accords and NATO's unanimous vote to support a country that was invaded by a communist country.
So there are a couple of things in this.
Representative McCormick on the Foreign Affairs Committee, on the Armed Services Committee, says that we must defend Ukraine because it was invaded by a communist country.
Well, as we know, the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, and certainly Russia, which was part of the USSR, has not been communist for those 30-some years.
So incredibly ill-informed.
You can make a slip.
It didn't sound like a slip.
He also misrepresented the Budapest memorandum.
But the other thing I want to draw your attention to on this, if you watch the clip, he went to an event at the Reagan Library where he got a song and dance.
And he repeated, every single Republican I talked to.
Well, what were they like?
Were they neocons?
More than likely.
But the other thing, in closing, that I would point to, look how often he looks down at his desk as he tries to throw out these quotes.
He was given a list.
He was given talking points, maybe by these wonderful secretaries of defense at the Reagan Library.
Nevertheless, he's repeating lines that it looks very clear to me that he doesn't understand.
He doesn't understand what he's saying.
He doesn't understand the rationale.
My guess is if you could have him sitting here on the show and we could have asked him five questions about what he said, he would have been incapable of answering any of them.
And I don't even mean gotcha questions.
I mean basic questions.
So here's a problem.
You have Congress that's full with some exceptions of know-nothings who nevertheless have enormous power and are fed talking points by the military-industrial complex, by the think tanks, by the neocons who are infected every corner of DC and beyond.
And it's a real problem because it affects the rest of us.
It affects our economy.
It affects our existential future if we continue to irritate nuclear-armed countries and pretend that we're going to go to war with them.
It's a big problem for the United States.
So next time you hear a congressman, don't forget, they don't know anything more than what they're being fed, with very few exceptions.
And there are some exceptions to that.
So I hope this rundown was useful to you.
Dr. Paul most likely will be back on the program tomorrow.
And so we'll see.
But whatever the case, we hope you'll tune in tomorrow.