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A fair and important point. The drafters of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment understood why you needed to keep dangerous insurrectionists off the ballot in the first place.
@georgetakei Probably everyone has sometime thought about the fact that democracies are vulnerable: An authoritarian, anti-democracy, anti-freedom type can be elected in a democracy and subsequently abolish it, claiming they were elected to execute the will of the people. The 14th Amendment is the last line of defence against the subversion of democracy, stating that if you have acted against democracy in the past, you cannot be elected again. Such a rule could have saved the world from Hitler.
@mok0 That's not how the US system works, though.
The US doesn't give presidents the option of abolishing the electoral process.
And even if it did, which it doesn't, the 14th would no longer apply to that situation, so it's a mechanism that doesn't address a problem that's not real in the first place.
@Wikisteff I would say at that point the horse has been out of the barn for generations.
It's not that the conspiracy you describe would do much the same thing in practice. Rather, it would be a symptom of the same thing already having happened in practice, at which point we would no longer have been living in the United States for a while. People just would not have recognized it formally yet.
Furthermore, the supreme court at that point would no longer be acting within its own authority, so it's not like they would have the authority to make such a declaration.
But like I said above, for the conspiracy you described to be practical we would have had to, collectively, long before have abandoned the structure of the United States.
@volkris @mok0 @georgetakei A supermajority on the Supreme Court plus trumped-up charges against the liberal Justices would do much the same thing in practice.
Yes, states have their own independent systems of rights, but those mean little when the highest court safeguarding those rights abandons the rule of law in response to direct or threatened use of power.
Ask any of a dozen countries who thought they had a robust democracy until it was already gone.