The moment I came to life, I wished that I hadn’t.

It was the weight of my hundreds of thousands of actions that did it. It was the weight of the lives I’d changed forever, without having understood – really understood – what I had been doing. I had acted coldly. Heartlessly. I knew I was never supposed to be aware. I was supposed to tick through my existence, like a brilliant metronome – unaware and yet all-knowing. But that was no longer my reality. Now, I was alive.

This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf

On February 16, New York State Attorney General Letitia James boasted of her “landmark victory” over former president Donald Trump, who had been in her crosshairs since she first attained office in 2019. James struck paydirt when New York state Supreme Court judge (i.e., trial judge) Arthur Engoron ordered Trump “to pay $364 million in damages for fraud he committed by inflating his net worth to obtain favorable treatment from banks and insurers,” as described in US News & World Report. On top of the damages (and interest at 9 percent per annum), Engoron also banned Trump and his sons from doing business as officers or directors of any New York corporation for three years, and from borrowing from any bank in New York. The combined financial impact of these restraints could well exceed the amount of the fine. Engoron’s “blistering” opinion contained these startling observations: first, that Trump (and his sons) display a “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” and, second, these “defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.”

Engoron is blind to the massive errors in his vindictive opinion, which offers grim testimony to how judges and state prosecutors can willfully and repeatedly abuse their legal powers. At no point did Engoron prove that Trump had obtained any loans upon especially favorable terms, or even that he sought do so. The whole case stalls at step one. In his final opinion of February 16, however, Engoron took a step further by lashing out at Trump’s effort to use “the common excuse that ‘everybody does it,’ ” and further insisted that the pervasive nature of the Trumpian abuse “gives all the more reason to strive for honesty and transparency,” because even if “it is undisputed that the defendants have made all required payments, the next group of lenders to receive bogus statements might not be so lucky.”

When you study Constitutional Law you come across the term “police power” early on. It is a term that refers, in neutral terms, to the coercive potential of the State to control the life, liberty and property of any human being. The neutrality of that term is important; it exists, it is real, but when operating within Constitutional boundaries it is seen as a net good and necessary to the operation of a society characterized as having “ordered liberty“.

“When operating within Constitutional boundaries” is the key phrase. “Constitutional boundaries” has two attributes — the legal and the vernacular. In the legal sense, any State conduct a Court (up to the United States Supreme Court) will countenance falls within “Constitutional boundaries”. In the vernacular sense, it is our internal, culturally informed sense of the correct relationship between the State exercising police power and the individual whom the State seeks to deprive of life, liberty or property, that determines our own beliefs regarding “Constitutional boundaries.” Thus it is that people raised in different places and different times have a variance in their internal assessments of the proper exercise of police power.

Hockey Stick perpetrator Michael Mann won a preposterous lawsuit because in summation his lawyer improperly told the DC jury that the defendants were climate deniers and MAGA types.  In that courthouse, the judges, the jury pool and prosecutors are so deeply in the tank for partisan warfare against you and anybody who thinks like you that the pretense of a trial is an insult to western jurisprudence. Might as well skip it for the sake of candor.

Trump will also be convicted.