In America, torn by increasingly radical political conflicts and buffeted by winds of suspicion and dispute over many electoral mechanisms, fears of disputes over the regularity of next November's vote were already alive. With the danger that the president's result will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, as happened in 2000, when the constitutional judges declared George Bush the winner over Al Gore by a difference of a few hundred votes without any detailed examination and real recounts.
But now, with Trump's appeals against his criminal proceedings, the constitutional judges are called upon to examine the validity of the accusation of “obstruction of government processes”, for which the protagonists of the attack on Congress were convicted on January 6, 2021 and have been in Colorado since yesterday. case, the Supreme Court is destined to play a central role in choosing the next occupant of the White House, starting with the candidate selection phase and defining the 2024 electoral path: a calendar in which the Republican and Democratic primaries will take place The states of the Union will be linked to Trump's court hearings and criminal proceedings, disputes over electoral rolls and the attempts by the conservative-majority House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Biden.
The Colorado Supreme Court's unprecedented ruling, which excluded Donald Trump from the state's primary election rolls and made the provision pending until January 4 to allow consideration of the appeal already filed by the former president, forces the constitutional judges to “extraordinary Christmas”. “: But we are only at the beginning of a journey that promises to be long and bumpy.
The Colorado judges' decision to declare the 14th Amendment applicable to Trump creates an unprecedented situation and emboldens Trump critics who wanted to file or have already filed similar lawsuits in other states. And it is unthinkable that a presidential candidate could only run in one part of the country.
The other extraordinary aspect of this chaotic election campaign is the trials against Trump. Who should be tried on March 4 for trying to block Biden's inauguration: the day before Super Tuesday, when a third of America will vote in the primaries (16 states, including the two most populous California and Texas) . In the summer it will probably be the turn of the trial for attempted election fraud in Georgia, while the judge in Florida (then appointed by Trump) seems inclined to postpone the trial because of the top secret documents that Trump took with him when he left the country. White House (for now, a preliminary meeting is scheduled for May 20).
But appeals to the Supreme Court have left the dates and charges of those trials in limbo. In order to blow it up, it is not necessary for the constitutional judges to disavow the ordinary judiciary. All you have to do is review the applications in the usual time frame: months of investigation, public meetings with the parties' lawyers, additional months for a decision. That's why super prosecutor Jack Smith called on the Supreme Court to “expedite” cases involving Trump. The reason is clear. If he is tried before voting, voters will know whether they are dealing with a guilty or innocent person. If everything is postponed until 2025 and Trump returns to the White House, these trials will most likely never take place.
Clear reason, but never cited by Smith. It cannot admit what is obvious: the trials are based on objective legal elements but have enormous political value. The decisions of the constitutional judges of a court with a large conservative majority (6 out of 9 judges, 3 of whom were appointed by Trump) will have it. But the prosecutors who indicted the former president have already managed to enable him to campaign by posing as a victim of political persecution.