You could rename the Colorado Supreme Court as the Colorado Kangaroo Court. Without Donald Trump being convicted (or even accused) of insurrection for the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill, four Democrat-appointed judges decided Trump is an insurrectionist who must be removed from the Republican primary ballot.
Network news reporters touted the result as "historic," "stunning," and "explosive." The ballot-banners preposterously proclaimed their "solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor." They pretend that throwing a former president off a primary ballot isn't doing someone a favor -- and by the usual rebound, the beneficiary will be Trump. After all we've seen in 2023, surely they know how this ball will bounce?
Numerous Democrats and pro-Democrat news outlets have praised this decision as proper and correct. The top of The New York Times editorial page touted it as a "Rebuke for the Ages." Their pull quote underlined the sentiment: "A state's court saw that concluding whether Trump engaged in an insurrection can't be left to voters."
There it is: elections "can't be left to voters." The liberals have spent the Biden era asserting democracy is in peril from conservatives trying to deny voting rights to brown and black people. Now, the liberals are explicitly advocating that there are no voting rights to pick Trump.
How can liberals strike a pose as the staunch guardians of democracy as they strike people from the ballot?
An Associated Press report displayed intellectual incoherence in noting the liberal group "Free Speech for People" filed a lawsuit in Oregon "seeking to bounce Trump from the ballot there." Democracy is somehow enhanced by removing the current front-runner in the Republican primaries from the list of choices.
Liberal journalists who burst with pride over how they keep democracy from dying in darkness have been warning that a second term for Trump would mean the end of democracy. Joe Scarborough seemed ready to pluck out his pompadour as he warned "one year from now ... American democracy can be over!" They warn Trump will use his Justice Department to indict his enemies. Scarborough even claimed he'll execute his opponents!
These people don't have the intellectual fortitude to consider what should be obvious: Biden's Justice Department and some elected Democrat prosecutors have indicted Biden's enemies -- not only Trump, but other loyalists who shared his false claim of a landslide victory in 2020. Like the crusading Colorado Supreme Court judges, they indulgently imagine that their vengeful legal partisanship isn't vengeful or partisan.
They don't have the mental capacity to consider the possibility that it's not undemocratic for Trump and conservatives to propose that in a second Trump term, it would be desirable to have executive-branch appointees who are more loyal to the elected president than unelected liberal media agitators; that it would be nice to have employees who don't immediately leak damaging things to Trump-hating media outlets to undercut every policy initiative and every pro-Trump political appointee.
They can't imagine it because this incentive structure changes entirely when Democrats win. Liberal journalists don't need anonymous sources to undercut Biden. Anonymous sources are deployed to promote the Democrats.
They certainly don't want to acknowledge that the constant attempts at derailing a Trump administration in the interests of pleasing their subscriber base of rabid leftists might look more like crass commerce than democratic idealism.
But at its most revealing, it looks like elitist liberal journalists are growing in discomfort at Biden's struggle in their own polls and thinking this election "can't be left to voters."
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.