A Blind Gift to Republicans

As 'your favorite President' announces his intention to run for office in 2024, Democrats and their allies in the press are trying to push a narrative that the 14th Amendment bars him from office. 

It is not obvious that these claims hold any water. The idea is that Trump 'led' an 'insurrection,' which he certainly did not do in person -- the case they are citing is of someone who actually entered the Capitol during the J6 event, which is not really plausibly 'an insurrection' in my opinion anyway. It was a riot, and riots are illegal, but an insurrection would generally require an actual plan, weapons of some sort, and other conditions that don't seem to be met. (It also shouldn't be a mousetrap: there are good questions about the FBI's role here.) 

It should be obvious that the whole thing is a gift to Republicans, and that whether it succeed or fails. If it fails it will be one more show of powerlessness against The Mighty Trump, which will encourage and invigorate his followers; if it succeeds, it will clear the decks of the Republican most likely to lose in '24 due to his sky-high personal negatives, while infuriating his supporters into doing whatever they can to defeat Democrats that year. 

The whole project is encouraging to me, actually. It suggests that the Democratic Party doesn't believe that it can pull the rabbit out of its hat in '24 that it pulled in '20: all that 'fortifying' of 'our democracy' may have been a trick that could only occur under the unique conditions of the pandemic, which made the population willing to accept the mass-scale illegality by the government in the conduct of the elections. Four years on, with Republican legislators at the state level pushing for more election accountability successfully in some key states, it might not be possible to do all that again. That would be very good news, and reason for renewed confidence that the election might be legitimate this time (or at least more legitimate).