We would like to think that, over the last year or so our track record with making calls or feeling the “vibes” of how a storyline, election, court case, etc is going to go is… alright. It would take a long time to do a tally but just anecdotally our skepticism that Jim Jordan would be elected Speaker while the mainstream media treated it like a done deal was right on the mark. We nailed it when we predicted that disgraced former President Trump would not show up in court in person in Atlanta in August because he didn’t want to be seen under the control of a judge on live television. Same story with the GOP primary debates. We knew the fat bastard wouldn’t show up for the same reason.

The only two currently living politicians disqualified for insurrection under the 14th Amendment.

Then there were some things that we didn’t get right. Our expectation that Ron DeSantis would actually prove a formidable challenge to Trump in the GOP primary (though Trump would most likely ultimately prevail) was not even remotely correct. At all. We definitely underestimated the House GOP’s willingness to formalize the Biden impeachment inquiry with a vote and, although we’re still skeptical they’ll pull the trigger, it’s certainly more likely to happen now than it had been. Our February 14th, 2023 headline “Nimrata Haley officially launches ten month presidential campaign” became officially wrong on December 14th, though we did hedge a bit in the text of that article.

Then there’s the Trump 14th Amendment efforts that, holy shit did we whiff in September when we wrote in the first “Disqualification Nation” that the push would most likely go nowhere.

The clip we opened with from that morning of Dem Virginia Senator Tim Kaine:

“Kaine’s head is the right place, gently calling it a liberal pipe dream that nobody should be taking it too seriously, especially not at the expense of any bandwidth that could be devoted to Dems actually winning a Biden vs Trump rematch outright. Between the longshot nature of it and the sheer amount of moving parts involved across 50 states with really only a handful of them in which such an effort would even make sense to try that makes it almost pointless to even address,” we wrote before this month’s Colorado and Maine decisions made clear it’s not a longshot nor was it pointless.

Further down we wrote that the case of “Cowboys for Trump” assclown Couy Griffin’s September 2022 removal from his post on the Otero County, New Mexico Board of Commissioners and barred from running for public office for the rest of his life under the 14th indicated to us that “any challenge to Trump’s eligibility for the ballot to succeed he would first need to be convicted in a court of law for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election,” which was obviously even more wrong.

We had actually at the time read an FAQ from CREW, the watchdog that spearheaded both the Griffin and Trump disqualification efforts which said explicitly, emphasis added, “Is criminal conviction required for disqualification under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment? No. As the Griffin court explained, Section Three imposes a qualification for office; it is not a criminal penalty and does not require a prior criminal conviction.” We chose to ignore that simply because Griffin had been convicted in a March 2022 bench trial of a single misdemeanor count of entering a restricted area, six months prior to his removal and disqualification in September 2022.

In retrospect that was dumb considering the misdemeanor charge wasn’t even close to “insurrection” but in our defense it was hard not to at least perceive a causal relationship given the timeline. CREW also didn’t even file the Griffin suit until two weeks after his conviction.

So yeah we fucked up on that conviction requirement and the overall state of the Trump removal efforts (To be fair, Donald and his minions didn’t see it coming either, per the New York Times).

Not one person has been charged with insurrection in connection with Jan. 6th.

Not. Even. One.

Libs STILL insist on keeping Trump off the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Even if he were guilty of insurrection—he isn’t—that provision STILL wouldn’t apply to him.

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) December 29, 2023

We’re happy to admit we got that part wrong. Certain people are still getting it wrong and whether they’re doing it willfully or not doesn’t really matter when they’re also people whom obviously have an interest in making sure nobody else connected to January 6th gets disqualified from office.

It’s actually worth asking if groups like the Heritage assholes or Stephen Miller’s dogshit legal scam operation or whoever intentionally stayed out of an effort to petition the US Supreme Court to overturn the New Mexico state Supreme Court’s final ruling earlier this year on Griffin’s eligibility.

But here’s something else we fucked up on that first time around: Griffin himself did not.

Yeah. This case is still pending, but hasn’t been granted certiorari yet. In fact the most recent action on it is that the court granted CREW’s lawyers an extension to respond on December 4th, pushing the deadline to January 16th, 2024. Even better: Griffin’s attorney is Trump’s friggin military boarding school roommate, Peter Ticktin, the assclown who in January 2023, along with other incompetent MAGA lawyer Alina Habba, got slapped with nearly $1 million in sanctions by a Florida federal judge for filing “knowingly false” or “reckless” claims in their “frivolous” failed Trump v Hillary Clinton (plus literally 31 other defendants) lawsuit over the 2016 election and Russia investigation.

All this shit going on about how Trump is going to take his 14th Amendment disqualification case to the Supreme Court and it doesn’t seem like anybody in the mainstream media’s deep bench of constitutional law experts that are aware that for months there’s been a petition from the only other living politician disqualified under the very same amendment, for the very same insurrection, that is at the very least being considered for review by the nation’s highest court. What the eff is going on?

Everyone except @Google @NPR @MSNBC @CNN @washingtonpost @RollingStone @Newsweek @nytimes @thedailybeast and many others. Yet those on the “right” were silent? @FoxNews @RealAmVoice @OANN @TuckerCarlson I wonder why? @joerogan

— Couy Griffin (@CowboyCouy) December 23, 2023

Hell even Griffin’s frustrated by it too. So we’re going to need to get back to our readers on this one, as much as we hate to leave a thread loose. We simply don’t know what the implications are of Griffin and Trump concurrently petitioning the court to overturn disqualifications under the 14th and we’re going to have to try to reach out to some of the big dogs in constitutional law to address it.

Just lazily making assumptions like that isn’t going to cut it this time because we don’t even have any base to start from. All the other “current state of play” summary analysis of the Trump 14th situation we were supposed to print here is going to have to wait for another installment after get a read on the significance (if any) of this Couy Griffin curveball from smarter people.

That way we’ll have someone else to blame if we get it wrong.