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Dec. 20, 2023 - Straight White American Jesus
37:35
Trump Off the Ballot in Colorado w/ Andrew Seidel

Brad speaks to constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel about the Colorado Supreme Court decision barring Trump from the ballot. They discuss whether or not this was the right decision, what will happen if it goes to SCOTUS, the arguments for leaving Trump on the ballot, and much more. Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Subscribe now to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi
Axis Mundi.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today early on a Wednesday morning.
The days, the times, they're all a mess.
There's holidays, there's Colorado Supreme Court decisions.
I'm still in my pajamas.
It's still dark outside, but you know what?
I'm talking to a pretty amazing person.
That's Andrew Seidel.
So, Andrew, thanks for joining me.
Oh, it is my pleasure.
Can't wait to dive into this one.
Many of you know Andrew, constitutional lawyer at Americans United, author of The Founding Myth and also of American Crusade, both books that should be on your holiday wishlist if you want to learn more about Christian nationalism as it relates specifically to the Supreme Court or to the founding of the country.
But today we are here on a special episode to talk about something that I, it was one of those moments, Andrew, where I was holding my two-month-old and trying to get her to take a nap on my phone.
Here it comes, New York Times.
Supreme Court of Colorado, Trump will not be on the ballot.
And that's what we're here to discuss.
It's according to the 14th Amendment.
So I'm going to just start with an easy one here.
Did you expect this?
Or was this a shock to you?
It wasn't a shock.
I mean, I have boned up on the 14th Amendment, Section 3 lately.
Over the summer, in legal circles, there was kind of big news made when two Conservative law professors, both members of the Federalist Society, William Bode and Michael Stokes Paulson, wrote a big article saying that Trump was disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from the ballot.
And since then, the debate's been kind of raging in our little niche area.
So I read that law review.
This was not entirely unexpected, but it is huge.
And it is a ground shift in American law.
So it's a BFD, but maybe not so surprising.
The reason I ask if it's surprising is because I remember that article, but I also know that recent decisions have basically said, no, Trump is going to be on the ballot.
And so, I mean, for me as a non-constitutional lawyer from afar, I thought, well, it seems like the tides are not in favor of this kind of event happening.
And so, Yeah.
So there was an Arizona Supreme Court decision, which came out the other way.
Arizona Supreme Court is kind of a broken institution, very similar to the US Supreme Court.
Michigan ruled against a similar challenge like this.
Minnesota also had a decision on this, but if you dig into that one, it's a little more interesting.
Basically, Minnesota said, You know, this is a presidential primary, and we're not going to apply the 14th Amendment to the primary.
Come back and talk to us for the general election, is essentially where they went with that one.
So, maybe not as clear.
So, I mean, not a whole lot of case law on this opinion.
And I think you can see why some courts might be nervous about doing this.
This is, though, 133 page.
Four to three, so four justices in favor, four against, opinion that disqualifies Trump from the Colorado ballot under Section 14, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
The case, I think this is important to note, the case was brought by registered Republicans and unaffiliated voters.
So there's a lot of talk about liberals and Democrats, but that's who were the actual people challenging Trump's ability to be on the ballot.
Qualified candidates is the phrase.
Those are the only ones who are allowed to go on the candidates.
So what this decision does technically is disqualifies Trump from that.
It says he's not a qualified candidate and therefore the Colorado Secretary of State can't put Trump's name on the primary ballot, nor, and this is a really important point for folks, may she count any write-in votes that are cast for him.
And obviously that would hold true for the general election too.
So you've already come out.
I've seen your tweet about this.
I've heard you talk about it.
You think this is the right decision.
So I want to just see if you can give us a brief summary from your perspective.
Why is this, in your mind, the right ruling on this issue?
Yeah, I think the substantive law is pretty clear, and I actually think it's legally not very complicated.
People who wish to hold office must meet certain basic requirements that are spelled out in the Constitution.
So for president, you have to be 35 years or older, you have to be a natural-born citizen in the United States, right?
Trump infamously tried to pass doubt on Obama for meeting this qualification, and you have to be a resident of the United States for 14 years, okay?
All that's in Article 2, Section 1, so that's three basic requirements.
That's really all that you get in the original Constitution, but Bradley, I'm sure you remember we had a pretty bad war once upon a time in this country.
Some people wanted to own other people.
Those people wanted to be free.
There was an insurrection, a civil war, an attempt to tear apart the Union in the name of owning human beings.
A lot of folks died.
This is the Civil War you're talking about, not the War on Christmas.
This is not the War on Christmas?
Correct.
Correct, yes, yes.
Civil War.
An important point to clarify for your listeners.
Not the War on Christmas.
All right.
Yes, yes.
And if you are listening and you want to try to at me about the Civil War being states' rights and not slavery, one, you'll lose, and two, you're probably not listening to this podcast, but three, go read Bradley's New York Times op-ed about the lost cause narrative of the Civil War.
And how it aligns with Christian nationalism and Trumpism.
What was that?
It was like about two weeks after the insurrection that you got that in, I believe.
Yeah.
Anyway, right?
Bad war.
Okay.
And that led us to pass some important amendments to the Constitution.
We banned owning people.
That was good.
We also realized that if our government was going to survive and function and not get taken over by the traitors who wanted to own people, that we had to do something else.
And so Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was passed to disqualify those insurrectionists from holding office.
And basically, the way it works is if you swore an oath to the Constitution, and then you violated that oath by waging war or insurrection against the Constitution, you are not to be trusted with public office.
I mean, this is a pretty unobjectionable, uncontroversial idea.
And the language specifically, which I'm going to trim down the clauses so that they apply to Trump, so it's a little bit easier for people to follow, it would read like this.
No person shall hold any office, civil or military, under the United States who, having previously taken an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.
Right?
Pretty clear text.
You can't be president if you engaged in insurrection.
And Trump did just that on January 6th.
And that is what the court found.
I think the conclusion is pretty inescapable.
He is ineligible for office.
And I mean, I think, again, the final piece of the puzzle that allows the Colorado Supreme Court to decide this is that under Colorado election law, only, quote, qualified candidates can be put on the ballot.
Since he's ineligible, he can't be put on the ballot.
So legally, this really is pretty basic stuff.
And again, it is not controversial.
This is something Germany did after World War II to recover from the Nazi regime.
We have disqualified lesser candidates on this provision already.
Cui Griffin in New Mexico, who actually wrote about in the January 6th report, he's praying on the West Terrace on a bullhorn and also inciting the mob.
I think we disqualified 14 or 15 people after the Civil War, too.
I mean, this is, again, pretty basic stuff.
And I think the law, substantively, is very, very clear.
So last night I saw that Justin Amash tweeted, Justin Amash was a kind of never-Trumper House of Representatives person from Michigan, is now just is out of Congress, is now a lawyer, but he had a tweet and I think he is somebody who I think In somewhat coherent terms, summed up the opposition to the argument you just made.
So I want to see what you would say to this kind of reasoning.
He said, look, January 6th might have been violent.
It might have been Whatever January 6th was, but there has been no court of law, no judgment that has determined it was an insurrection.
There's been nothing coming from any legislative or judicial So yes, it is an insurrection to many of us, but not legally.
So this is a bad decision until the insurrection is codified as such in American law or American court law or American whatever.
What would you say to that kind of line of reasoning?
Yeah, I think it misses the basic point that this is a court deciding that this was an insurrection.
And this isn't just, you know, them pulling this conclusion out of the air.
There was a trial in this case.
There was argument.
There was a lengthy trial and briefing.
In fact, Trump could have testified in this, but his team didn't have him do that.
And they didn't even use the full time for their argument.
Right?
They could have had another extra day or two of trial.
They didn't want or need more to argue against the idea that this was an insurrection.
I mean, we have a court of law taking the time, doing the fact finding and applying the legal definition of an insurrection to those facts and saying, yes, this is an insurrection.
And then the Colorado Supreme Court reviewing that decision.
De novo, which just means basically like starting from scratch and reviewing the whole thing and saying, yep, this is an insurrection.
So I mean, this to me, it really misses like the basic fact that that is something that has already happened.
And you know, I mean, there are a lot of other things that I think can be said about that.
Emily in your phone, who's this great activist, really active on Instagram.
Brilliant.
She posted something that stuck with me.
She said something along the lines of, during the impeachment, we heard that this has to be decided by the courts.
Now, a court is deciding it, and they're saying it has to be decided by the people.
And when the people decide it, and they decide that Joe Biden wins, they say the election is rigged, and they try to have this insurrection in the first place.
And it's this kind of vicious circle that we are stuck in.
And this was a court deciding that Trump committed an insurrection.
He literally had his day in court, several of them.
He even forewent some of them.
So to me, that doesn't hold a whole lot of water.
Yeah, so if I take what you're saying here, you know, you're saying to Amash and anyone else who would make this argument, yes, there has been a court.
It's called the Supreme Court of Colorado.
They spent a lot of time, a lot of resources.
They began from the very beginning and just looked at it from every angle and said, Yep, insurrection as it turns out, and so therefore disqualified.
Now, the question on everyone's mind as soon as this happened was, well, Supreme Court.
And I can already hear you in my ear saying, do not rely on the Supreme Court to save us.
And that would seem to apply in this case, but I'll let you tell us, what do you expect to happen with the Supreme Court in this case?
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's really the question now.
And just so folks understand, the Colorado Supreme Court stayed its decision, meaning that its decision doesn't take effect until January 4th, which gives the Trump team time to appeal.
They've already said they're going to appeal.
This is definitely going to the Supreme Court.
The first question is does the Supreme Court take the case so the Supreme Court doesn't have to take every case that comes its way But it takes a vote of four justices to do so given the split that we talked about between state supreme courts on this issue Given the the magnitude of it.
It's virtual Guarantee that they are going to take the case Though those are famous last words when you when you talk about this I mean there so there are a lot of things that I'm looking at when I think about this Supreme Court, which I have Pretty much zero faith in.
The first is, is Justice Thomas going to recuse?
Ginny Thomas, his wife, was heavily involved in January 6th.
You know, John Eastman, who was the legal architect of that debacle, is a former clerk of his.
He and Eastman, or Eastman and Ginny, were talking over email.
Like, you know, I detail a lot of this in American Crusade and more has come to light since we published.
Ginny basically supported these crimes.
So Clarence can't be impartial and he must recuse himself.
He probably won't.
So that's one thing I'm going to be watching.
Another thing that's really interesting is originalism.
You know, this opinion by the Colorado Supreme Court is...anybody could go read this.
It's a really well-written opinion.
I think the logic and the reasoning are very, very sound.
But it's as originalist and textualist as you get, meaning that the court looked at, okay, what does the words in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, what do those words mean?
What did they mean at the time it was passed?
And the court is going to have to betray that supposed principle of originalism, which is a garbage way to decide law anyway, utter trash, but that's a whole other podcast that we could do.
I guess one thing that, if we get a little in the weeds here, some people listening are going to...
Are going to have the kind of knowledge to be asking themselves this.
Sure.
Did the Colorado Supreme Court justice who wrote this opinion, was the tack taken in the trial such that the originalist approach was meant eventually for the Supreme Court of the United States and some of its originalist conservative justices to have to betray their own Yes.
Okay.
There absolutely was.
rule for Trump to be on the ballot.
I mean, was there a design there or is that just, I mean, is this, okay.
So there absolutely was.
And in fact, in fact, there's a very clear signal that that was designed.
And that is that the Colorado Supreme Court quoted Neil Gorsuch to Neil Gorsuch.
Um, so, so there's this, um, 2012 case, uh, where the 10th circuit court of appeals, which is a federal court, um, affirms a Colorado secretary of state's decision to exclude a naturalized citizen from a presidential affirms a Colorado secretary of state's decision to exclude a naturalized citizen from And.
The judge who wrote that very short opinion, it was basically a paragraph long, was Judge Neil Gorsuch.
And so then judge, now Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that it is, quote, a state's legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.
Okay.
Right.
So very, very clear statement by a Supreme Court justice now saying that states have the power to keep people who are constitutionally prohibited off the ballot, which applies to Trump.
So it's going to...
That is a clear signal to all of us that this court was writing with an eye towards the Supreme Court deciding this case and they're trying to make it hard for the Gorsuch's on the court to twist themselves into a pretzel to get out of this one.
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Is there any sense that the Supreme Court won't take it?
Is there any sense that Yeah, go ahead.
There are a couple of different options, and I think there's almost no chance that they don't take it.
So, if they decline the case, Trump is disqualified, and he's disqualified in Colorado, and you're going to see a flood of these cases everywhere, which all are going to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
So, they're going to have to eventually take one of these and decide the case.
They could accept the case and delay, which would lessen the impact or possibly have no impact on the ballot, like probably, for instance, the primary ballot, but maybe even the general, depending on how long they take.
Or they could accept the case and decide it quickly, and then that Supreme Court decision will be binding law of the land.
Okay.
And so the question then becomes, well, what does that decision look like?
And it could take any number of forms.
It could be a procedural decision, which says the Colorado Supreme Court doesn't have the authority to decide this, which is why they include that line from Neil Gorsuch.
Or it could be that the electors, those Republicans and independents who are challenging, don't have standing to challenge Trump's placement on the ballot.
Okay.
Or it could be on the substance of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
It could say he didn't engage in insurrection.
The rational person in me, the law student who was taught to revere this court as an institution and to believe that the words that are carved into it, equal justice under law, into the edifice of our Supreme Court actually mean something.
Which would mean that no person is above the law, right?
That person, who is maybe Charlie Brown running at Lucy and getting ready to kick the football, wants to believe that the court will do the right thing here, of course.
And I think there's even a good political argument that the court should do, should disqualify Trump or should uphold this decision, and that's that...
One, they don't need him anymore.
And two, the court is under such fire right now.
If you're John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, you are getting just bombarded by facts and reality about how awful and captured this court is every day.
A new ProPublica drops and it's like, what do they have today?
This would be a really fantastic way to silence those critics and to all the people who I have been working to rile up in the middle and, you know, the center left trying to get them to see that this is a captured court and it's a problem.
Making progress would lose all of that progress if this court were to weigh in and say, yep, He committed insurrection.
He is disqualified.
And there'd still be tons and tons of time for the Republican Party to field a candidate and get them on the ballot in a lot of these states, right?
And we should probably talk about who gets to decide and should the voters decide and things like that.
That's a pretty popular argument that's coming up.
Yeah, I want to go there quickly.
And I know you can't prognosticate, and I don't want to turn this into like a fantasy football situation.
But I think that a lot of us are like, well, we know what Alito and Thomas are going to do.
Alito's probably hadn't slept and is probably just shaking a tumbler right now in anger and will not sleep until this is, you know, he has a chance to write the minority or majority opinion.
The ones that I think at least those of us who are not as trained and specialized as you are, are thinking about are people like John Roberts, people like Brett Kavanaugh, to some extent Neil Gorsuch, and to some extent Amy Coney Barrett.
So, any sense on any of those folks?
Again, I don't want to put you in some place where you have to kind of, you know, give us a, you know, 49ers minus 10 kind of situation, but any sense of where they'll land just in terms of previous decisions, previous opinions, anything of that kind?
I mean, my guess is that they find a way to undo this decision by the Colorado Supreme.
I think that's the real politic analysis.
If somebody were like, I'll give you $100, you get to bet it on whatever, that's what I would bet it on.
What form that takes, whether it's punting on standing saying no elector can challenge this, or the substance of Section 14, or Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, I don't, that I'm unwilling to wade into, but there's a good chance that we get a lot of highfalutin talk of democracy from But certainly from Alito and Thomas about, you know, the voters and being robbed of a choice.
And it's possible that that becomes a majority opinion on this court.
We've seen that happen time and time again lately.
So, yeah, I mean, and the reality is, you know, right now we're talking 10 electoral votes in the state of Colorado.
But the question is, Whatever the court does here is going to impact everything because there are other cases like this going on and more are going to be brought.
I want to talk about the argument that this is equivalent to stealing the election real quick.
Real quick, if let's say somehow what you just predicted does not come through, that the Colorado decision stays put and stands.
You've hinted at this just now, but does that mean we see 10, 20 other states follow suit and Trump is not on the ballot in 30 American states come November 2024?
I think so, yeah.
Or even in the Republican primary, I should say.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I do think so.
And I think the decisions will be brought pretty quickly, or the cases will be brought pretty quickly.
Some of them are already working their way through.
It really, depending on how they decide that, it would answer all of the questions.
And it would be almost a pro forma application for a lot of the cases.
So you'd see it in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Basically, all the swing states would really happen pretty fast.
Virginia, North Carolina.
So it would And everybody ought to want it to happen fast at that point, too, because that allows for a candidate to get onto the ballot in time for the general election.
So yes, the pro-democracy stance at that point would be, let's get this done as quick as we can.
I'm going to try to ask this next question in a way that makes sense and is coherent.
Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War.
It's a reconstruction amendment meant to federalize protections and not allow rogue states to do things that would exclude certain folks from democracy.
Just put it that way.
Freed slaves, black people, etc., and others.
We now have a situation where a state has made a decision, and it seems that the Supreme Court, you're predicting, will overturn that state's decision.
So, in some sense, the 14th Amendment is doing exactly what it was designed to do, except for it will put an insurrectionist On the ballot rather than take him off.
It's 5.30 in the morning over here.
Did that make any sense?
It did.
So here's the way that I have seen it praised.
Who should decide this question?
Who should decide this?
And the answer that you get from a lot of pundits in particular who are in the center who are uncomfortable with this is the voters should decide this, right?
Like this, I think this is another way of saying it.
But as you were pointing out, the entire point of this provision of the 14th Amendment is to remove certain decisions from the voters, right?
Like we have, we have, we, and by the way, this is, this is part of the constitution.
We the people agreed that if you committed an insurrection, you don't get to serve in That's the definition of our Constitution.
That's our social contract.
And think back to, as you were pointing out, when the provision was put in place.
There were plenty of voters, probably a majority in most southern states, who wanted their insurrectionist dads to hold office again.
The point was to prevent them from doing so, despite the fact that probably overwhelming numbers wanted them there.
Right?
So there's this idea that it's anti-democratic to bar somebody from office.
But Trump took the most anti-democratic action there was.
He attempted to overturn the results of a free and fair election by essentially inciting a violent coup.
And it's kind of absurd.
In a way that I think we're not doing a good job of pointing out, right?
The insurrection was anti-democratic.
The consequences to that insurrection are not.
It's an FA, FO type of situation, right?
The FA is not anti-democratic, or the FA is anti-democratic, not the FO that comes as a result.
So, I mean, the court, too, was very kind of clear about this.
You know, they said, we are mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law without fear and favor, without being swayed by public reaction to decisions.
Right.
And another way of saying that is no person is above the law.
And even that's true, even if it makes a lot of people angry, even if it makes a lot of extreme people angry, even if it makes one political party angry, this this is not about partisan politics.
This is about the words of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic, and that's why those words were written into the Constitution.
And I just want to point out, too, there is an escape valve written into the 14th Amendment, Section 3, which I've not mentioned yet, which is dereliction on my part, right?
Not dereliction of like 187 minutes where there's people attacking the Capitol and you don't do anything, not that kind, but anyway.
Congress may vote by a two-thirds majority of each House to remove such disability, right?
This is not permanent.
And that happened in the past.
So if there is a truly unjust application of law, there is an out.
But this is not an unjust application of law.
And I think that's like really crucial because it's important to note that a lot of the objections you're seeing and you will see today and in the future, they're not an objection to the substance.
Like, people will say, oh, it's not entirely clear that he engaged in an insurrection.
We need a court to decide.
Okay, a court did decide.
Like, some people say, basically, what they're really saying is, we have other fears here.
But section three is clear, and there's a legal maxim that I wrote about in American Crusade, and I apologize because it's in Latin.
I hate it when lawyers go to their Latin.
But it's Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum.
And what that means is, do justice though the heavens fall.
Do justice though the skies fall.
That's where we are.
This is the right call on the law.
I don't think there is any question.
Just like those other eligibility requirements, right?
If Trump was 33 years old, he'd be disqualified.
If his birth certificate were discovered that he was born in Germany in 1944 and was the love child of Hitler and somebody and, you know, not in the U.S.
in 1946, you know, I wouldn't be surprised then.
Actually, Bradley, I may have to go write that bestseller, but he would be disqualified.
You know?
This is not hard.
Trump violated his oath of office.
He invited a mob to overturn a free and fair election.
And even if you don't believe that, he did nothing in those hours.
So that is where we are, and this is the right call.
It's just a question of whether we as a nation have the courage to stand by it.
I want to follow up on that point as we close.
Let me ask you real quick, however.
A lot of people are heading to the holidays and they're going to meet Uncle Ron, who's going to talk about how the Democrats are trying to steal the election, etc.
So if I sum up what you just said, it goes something like this.
Democracy means everyone gets a voice.
Democracy means everyone has a chance to share in power.
And democracy means that we elect folks from among us to be our leaders, whether in Congress, whether as mayors, whether as president.
However, there are things you can do.
That will take you out of the running for such office, even if a majority of the people want you to be their leader as mayor, as congressperson, or as president.
So even if 80% of the people want you to be mayor, and you have done things such as attack the United States, try to overturn the government of the United States, or your community or wherever, then you are no longer eligible to be a leader in this country.
And so I just want to point out that we're talking about the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Jefferson Davis, right?
President of the Confederacy was there's a sort of famous question of should Jefferson Davis have been tried and put in jail and this and that for his crimes?
You know, what should have happened to him after the Civil War?
Certainly many people worried that the likes of Jefferson Davis would have been back in the Senate or back in Congress or back somewhere if they would have been allowed to run.
So these questions are in the ether of American history.
They do haunt American history.
Is that the right way to sum up the argument?
Because there's going to be people who hear the Fox News clips of like, well, here's the Democrats trying to steal the election.
They can't win, so they just don't let him even run.
Yeah, I think I mean, I think it is.
And I think there's a few facts that you can hold on to two that are going to be useful that are already being ignored on Fox News, right?
This case, the people challenging Trump's placement on the ballot were Republicans and independents.
That's a that's a pretty That's an important point to hold on to.
I also think the age and the birth requirements are pretty useful when you're having these conversations with folks, too.
You know, ask, can a 30-year-old be president, even though the Constitution says you have to be 35?
Ask them if somebody who's born in Kenya can be president, even though the Constitution says no.
They're going to say no.
So why is this any different?
This is just another qualification, disqualification in this case, for office.
And, you know, to your broader point, and this is not going to be useful in your conversations with your crazy uncle at the Christmas dinner table, but, you know, the racist overtones, the white Christian nationalism, right?
In that insurrection, we're clearing this.
I mean, this is a big chunk of what you wrote about in your op-ed.
You know, the Confederate flag flew in the halls of Congress for the first time.
Trump is attacking black poll workers, right?
Attacking cities as the sites of election fraud.
And Sherilyn Eiffel has spoken and written about this.
And to me, it is appropriate, poetic, appropriate, poetic, and just that Trump gets the boot from a section of the Constitution that is meant to ensure racial equality and prevent our country from backsliding into slavery.
I think that is just chef's kiss.
Well, it means the birther-in-chief may be disqualified from the ballot in ways that he thought his predecessor should have been.
Last question.
Is I'm not going to ask you what will happen in the unlikely case that the Colorado decision remains and is not overturned by the Supreme Court.
I want to ask what you think people should do.
I think that all of us can envision that there will be unrest, that in Colorado, in Denver, in Colorado Springs, there would be protests.
There would be a lot.
Let's just put it that way.
Yeah, I mean, I love this question and I'm so glad you're asking it because I think we do lose sight of it.
And one thing that I've been screaming about as I was writing American Crusade is that we have to stop relying on the courts to provide us the solution to What we are facing, to the rising white Christian nationalism, to Trumpism, to Donald Trump.
It is not going to happen.
They are not going to stop.
We have to stop them.
So to me, the solution is that we have to vote in overwhelming numbers to prevent The big lie from taking hold, right?
The last election was really decided because of the structural inequities in the Electoral College, et cetera, by something like 40,000 votes, right?
That's half a Taylor Swift concert, okay?
That needs to not happen this time.
It needs to be just an overwhelming victory.
And I know some of you out there are thinking, yeah, but Biden won by millions of votes if you look at the Yes, but like let's not make it close this let's not make it a case where Trump can argue and can can have these kind of not I don't want to use the word credible but in the minds of his followers did this kind of It's a credible argument that this was a close election, that this was a stolen election.
Let's just completely swamp him and run him out on a rail, electorally speaking.
That is the solution.
So if you are not doing something to make that happen, the election is just months away.
If you are not volunteering, if you are not knocking on doors, if you are not making phone calls, if you are not organizing to get the vote out, Everywhere.
Even if you're in a deep blue state, you can be calling, making calls in Wisconsin and making calls in Virginia and making calls in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
If you are not doing something, you need to figure out what you can do.
Right now.
All right.
Thank you so much, Andrew, for your time on short notice.
I'm sure you're going to be on the phone, on the microphone, all over the place today talking.
You're going to be sore and lose your voice.
You're a constitutional lawyer.
You're a TikTok star.
Where should people find you if they'd like to follow?
I'm sure the updates on this issue that you'll be giving as the next few days unfold.
Yeah, I'm gonna be following this quite closely.
I'm Andrew L. Seidel, S-E-I-D-E-L, on all of the platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Patreon.
I'm still on X, though.
That is kind of a cesspool over there, but, um...
Yeah, and if you're interested in this stuff, American Crusade is a good place to start, and the Founding Myth is not bad for Christmas gifts either, as Bradley mentioned.
So, thank you for having me on.
As always, friends, you can find us at Straight White JC, you can find me at Bradley Onishi, and you can always use your Support, check out the show notes for our link tree and everywhere you can find us.
Other than that, we hope you're safe.
Hope you are able to enjoy the coming week and weeks with family and friends and not turn over any dinner tables arguing about Colorado and the Supreme Court.
Thanks for listening.
We'll catch you next time.
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