A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Colorado Ruling Continues To Reverberate

After the Disqualification Clause cases ran into headwinds in Minnesota and Michigan courts, I was not expecting much from the effort in Colorado. So much so that we didn’t even prep a pre-write (a draft prepared in anticipation of a news event) for the Colorado Supreme Court ruling.

But in my defense(!), we’d been covering each of the cases closely mostly via TPM’s Josh Kovensky so the issues weren’t new to us, unlike for so many others (see below).

Yesterday was a weird day of watching fair-minded people of good faith play catch up – and watching Trump world and right-wing media perform an epic flip-out.

I would just be very cautious as a reader about anyone who is expressing certainty about what the Supreme Court will do in this case. It’s very complicated, the court has many options available, and while the ideological divide on the court is a real dynamic I wouldn’t take the easy route of letting that drive your expectations.

In that spirit of uncertainty, I wanted to share a bit from law professor Steve Vladeck, who is of the view that the Supreme Court is likely to let this case ride for a bit and decide it not immediately but before the end of the term in June, meaning Trump would remain on the Colorado GOP primary ballot:

The Colorado Supreme Court stayed its ruling until January 4—and, if Trump seeks review from the U.S. Supreme Court by then, indefinitely until the U.S. Supreme Court resolves Trump’s appeal. Given that the ballot-printing deadline for the primary election in Colorado is January 5 (which is certainly not a coincidence), the stay all-but guarantees that Trump will be on the Republican primary ballot in Colorado. The real question is what happens thereafter.

I also think it is inevitable that the U.S. Supreme Court will step in. The stay just means it won’t have to do anything immediately—and can take up the matter on an expedited, but not insanely compressed, schedule. In other words, the Court could plan to resolve the case by the end of its current term (so, June), and the decision would come in time to resolve whether Trump could appear on the general election ballot in Colorado. (The Court will likely want to move faster; the point is that it has months, not weeks, to do so.)

That’s definitely one possible route for the court to take. I’m not quite as confident that it will take that course. But again, there’s no certainty here. So no need for predictions. Just watch this play out for now.

The Campaign And Elections Prism Remains The Wrong One

Don’t rely on political reporters to cover the Disqualification Clause story well.

On The Ground In Colorado

• Colorado Supreme Court justices face a flood of threats on social media after disqualifying Trump from the ballot
• Colorado GOP is discussing switching to a caucus if Trump remains off the primary ballot

Now We Wait For The Supreme Court

Now that Donald Trump has filed his opposition to the Supreme Court taking up his immunity claims immediately and bypassing the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the ball is in the high court. No way to know when it will rule on whether to take the case, but I would be surprised if we don’t hear by the end of this week due to the urgency and the upcoming holidays.

Also: Be looking for Trump to appeal the Colorado Supreme Court Disqualification Clause ruling to the Supreme Court before the end of the week, too.

Trump’s Lawyering Just Got A Little Bit Better

With the addition of John Sauer of Missouri to his legal team, Trump now has a Rhodes scholar and Harvard Law grad who clerked for Judge Luttig and Justice Scalia. And it definitely showed in the filing with the Supreme Court on the immunity claim. It’s a less bombastic filing that actually grapples with the legal issues rather than merely throwing around political invective.

Still, Sauer has only argued one case before the Supreme Court compared to the more than 100 that Michael Dreeben, the latest addition to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, has handled.

Pay Up, Rudy!

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell cleared the way for Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss to begin collecting immediately on their $148 million defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani, amid concerns that he may hide assets from them.

The Latest In the Mar-a-Lago Case

Things continue to be very quiet in the other major federal prosecution of Donald Trump. Thanks, Aileen Cannon! But with sycophantic filings like this one from Trump, you start to wonder at what point Trump’s effort to co-opt her for his own purposes becomes too embarrassing and uncomfortable for her to continue to play along. Probably never, but I do wonder!

Confederate Memorial Removed From Arlington National Cemetery

Bingo!

We’ve spent nearly two decades now banging the drum that Republicans are using bogus claims of voter fraud to restrict voting by people of color. The WaPo has a smart look at the effect of the most recent wave of Republican-led crackdowns in the name of “election integrity.” The prosecutions across six states look like this:

• 76 percent of defendants whose race or ethnicity could be identified were Black or Hispanic; 24 percent were white.
• Registered Democrats made up 58 percent of those charged whose party could be identified; registered Republicans were 23 percent. 
• “Of the 115 cases that have been resolved as of mid-December, 42 ended in dismissal, acquittal or dropped charges — nearly the same as the number of guilty verdicts.”

2024 Ephemera

• Trump’s GOP rivals are running so scared that they’re condemning the Colorado ruling that takes him off the ballot.
• 12 states where the fate of abortion rights could be on 2024 ballots
• CA-Sen poll: Adam Schiff (D) 28%; Steve Garvey (R) 19%; Katie Porter (D) 17%; Barbara Lee (D) 14%
• Biden condemns Trump for saying that that immigrants are ‘poisoning’ America.
• Biden campaign pulls no punches, juxtaposing Trump quotes with Hitler quotes:

This is not a coincidence pic.twitter.com/oaSDcb0yzs

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 20, 2023

How Trump Could Decimate the Civil Service

We’ve been covering Trump’s Schedule F scheme since late in his first term, but it remains a central element of his retribution plan for a second term.

For the backstory, here’s some of TPM’s past coverage:

• This Excel Spreadsheet Could Put Thousands Of Federal Employees In Trump’s Crosshairs
• Trump Admin Salts The Earth As Biden Attempts A Transition
• Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Fed Workers Aims At A Century Of Legal Precedent
• Trump Departs DC Without Carrying Out Order To Make Federal Workers Easier To Fire

Ukraine Aid Is Dead For This Year

This is a classic example of how politicians bury bad news and are aided and abetted by news coverage that is too credulous.

Ukraine aid has been DOA for several weeks. The House already left town for the holidays, but the Senate kept up the appearances that something might happen for several extra days as negotiations continued over a border package to pair with aid to struggling Ukraine. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer kept the Senate officially in session early this week to add to the sense of potentially imminent action.

But now the Senate has left town, too, without any kind of deal.

The effect of slowrolling the bad news was to dribble out incremental coverage and avoid a wave of definitive “Ukraine Aid Is Dead” headlines. It worked.

What’s Kellyanne Conway Up To These Days?

Ohhh …

Kellyanne Conway suggests Kristi Noem should try to ban Biden from the South Dakota ballot. Noem says she doesn't think she has that power. pic.twitter.com/DwAhl8Im6S

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 21, 2023

Kellyanne: I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes. And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion. pic.twitter.com/fffuat7BVR

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 20, 2023

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Extraordinary Times

The decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Donald Trump from the GOP primary ballot has cast us deeper into uncharted waters.

I had a vague notion even into adulthood that the constitutional order in America was challenged every 50 years or so in ways that stress-tested the system. By that measure, I regret to inform you that we live in extraordinary times.

Since 1998, some of the markers – by the numbers:

• 3 going on 4 presidential impeachments;
• 2 winning presidential candidates losing the popular vote;
• 1 going on 2 presidential elections decided by the Supreme Court;
• 1 attempted coup; and
• 4 criminal prosecutions of an ex-president.

While it’s not just Donald Trump, you can see his outsized impact on those numbers.

I’m not of the view that testing constitutional limits is somehow dangerous or ill-advised. We should thoroughly ventilate the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause, as is being done now. It’s been a mistake, in my view, to spend decades circling around but never quite confronting the true extent of executive privilege. In the half century since Watergate, we shouldn’t have operated under the untested specter of a Justice Department opinion that sitting presidents can’t be criminally charged.

So I don’t think there’s anything inherently ill-advised about treating the Constitution as a robust mechanism to be used, tested, amended, and reinvigorated. Not every brush with a constitutional question is a constitutional crisis. (To clear up any possible confusion, I’m talking here about the constitutional structure itself, not the scope of individual rights protected by the Constitution, whose developments have their own history and evolution under the law.)

The next few months are going to see a series of new tests.

What’s On Tap For The Supreme Court

It’s hard to envision a scenario in which the Supreme Court doesn’t take up the Colorado decision. Not touching it leaves a momentous decision intact and could lead to a patchwork of state-by-state decisions without a nationwide Supreme Court ruling to provide consistency.

But touching it creates all sorts of legal and logistical challenges. I think it’s going to be important, for instance, to see this first and foremost as an elections case. Colorado officials will soon be up against the clock on basic election administration issues like printing the ballot. While the GOP primary in the state isn’t until March, early voting starts well before then in February. That creates a sense of urgency not just in Colorado, but in other states where courts may be newly emboldened to rule against Trump on the Disqualification Clause.

I’ve seen a number of smart observers note that because the Colorado decision was stayed until the Supreme Court rules, the Supreme Court could do nothing and just let the GOP primary proceed with Trump on the ballot. I’m skeptical that it will backdoor its way to a decision that way. It’s possible, but that would cast a cloud over the entire election.

I lean toward more expedited and immediate action from the Supreme Court, but I can’t predict the outcome here. There are a number of different paths the Supreme Court could take. The suspense is real. The stakes could hardly be higher.

A Departure From The Norm

Neither the majority opinion nor the three dissents (remember, all seven justices were appointed by Democratic governors) offers much real insight into how the Supreme Court will rule, so I’m not going to dissect them here for you. I think the Supreme Court will largely consider the legal issues anew. Remember: the Supreme Court really isn’t bound by the Colorado decision, except it has to defer on what state court says about Colorado law. So this will be close to a fresh bite at the apple for the high court.

Informed Reaction

• Harry Litman: “[W]e are in for a wild and woolly constitutional ride over the next 16 days and perhaps beyond, and it’s difficult to know where or how it will end.”
• Aaron Blake: 4 takeaways from the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualifying Trump
• Law professor Derek Muller: “Never in history has a presidential candidate been excluded from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. United States Supreme Court review seems inevitable, and it exerts major pressure on the court.”

Political Analysis Falls Short

The reaction to the Colorado decision from elected officials and political reporters (as opposed to legal reporters) was predictable and tired.

Jack Smith Still Gets Access To Rep. Scott Perry’s Phone

WaPo: “A federal judge on Tuesday granted the Justice Department access to nearly 1,700 records recovered from the cellphone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in a long-running legal battle in the criminal investigation of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

Plus … bit more on what was on the phone.

A Glimpse Of What DOJ Was Doing Before Jack Smith

Politico: “Months before special counsel Jack Smith took over the case, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C. were considering obstruction charges in connection with Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.”

From The Ellipse To The Supreme Court

TPM was the first to report back in 2021 that a second rally had been planned for Jan. 6 by Trump’s “Stop The Steal” allies, this one at the Supreme Court. Now a new inspector general’s report from the Interior Department adds further confirmation and detail to what we previously knew.

Rudy G’s Financial Desperation Played A Role In Probe

Newly unsealed documents show that criminal investigators were looking into whether Rudy Giuliani’s antics in Ukraine were driven in part by his increasingly dire personal financial situation. As you know, the case was closed with charges being brought against Giuliani.

What Trump II Would Do To The Pentagon

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: How Trump Is Laying The Groundwork For A Coopted Military

Sign Of The Times: Trump Denies Reading Mein Kampf

Trump renewed his vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric in Iowa Tuesday, telling a crowd: “They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing — they’re destroying our country.”

Great Lede

Philip Bump on the racism and ahistoricism of Trump’s “poison the blood” rhetoric:

Donald Trump doesn’t hate immigrants. He married two women who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Nor is he particularly insistent about immigrants having children in the United States. His three oldest children were born to Ivana Trump, who at the time had not yet become a citizen. His youngest child was born in March of the year that Melania Trump got her citizenship.

Removal Of Confederate Memorial Is Back On

A federal judge in Virginia lifted the order blocking removal of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery after visiting the site himself and being satisfied that graves were not being disturbed, as the pro-memorial plaintiffs had claimed.

The Best Reaction Of All

No! Don’t do it! Pleeeease!

I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous… pic.twitter.com/qbpNf9L3ln

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 20, 2023

For its part, the Colorado Republican Party says it will ditch the presidential primary in favor of a caucus if Trump is left off the ballot.

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!