This post is a smattering of stuff I've talked about recently; video and board games, SCOTUS, web stuff. Starting with the last one, a few weeks ago Rob linked me the 'nownownow movement'. According to the search engine blurb (since the site didn't renew its certs):

nownownow.com

2015-11-20. A month ago I announced the /now page movement, where many personal websites are adding a "/now" page to answer the question, "What are you focused on now?". At the time, only ten websites had a /now page. Now there are over 280. It's incredible. People are...

It kind of makes sense, especially for the 2015 peak-Twitter mindset: spin a /now page off of your website's landing page that provides your latest status. The post-2015 internet certainly hasn't become less obsessesed with spotlighting the newest content.

But, well, writing something like this takes a lot longer than typing into an app "@SBUX NOT PUTTING ENOUGH VANILLA IN #LATTES NOW. MANY SUCH CASES." I could certainly publish tweetlike blurbs with my latest one-liner or food pic, but this kind of content normally relies on a context or conversation (/emoji reaction) for significance.

One of the federated microblogging platforms might support this? Either way, the distinctness of microcontent and contentful webpages is probably why Twitter has stayed Twitter (more or less) and Blogger has stayed Blogger. And it's why nownownow and microblogs haven't really caught on (apologies to statusbloggers and poemposters).

In any event, the 'now movement' hasn't aged well:


I can't fully fault the technical aspects of the movement for abandoned /now pages. Plenty of personal sites are just people looking for exposure or affiliate money. When they see that linkedin or tiktok is a better way to achieve their goals- *poof*.

It'd be trivial to add a redirect link from chrisritchie.org/now to this page when I click 'publish'. But I'm definitely not playing Helldivers right now (my time) and there's only a slim chance I'll be doing that when you read this. If you want nownownow you have to shoot me a message, instead you're getting recentrecentrecent.

Source.

The Roberts court seems to be reaping what they have sown in overturning Roe and declaring open season on firearms regulations and 'violations' of nondelegation. The US judicial conference recently asked jurisdictions to please not allow activist lawsuits to automatically be assigned to the Matthew Kacsmaryks of the country. I've recently mentioned a few bonkers Fifth Circuit opinions that were stayed, overturned, and/or heavily criticized in nonpartisan editorials.

The Mifepristone thing argued this past Monday wasn't on my watchlist but afterward I read that there were some spicy comments from justices to the effect of, "why are we listening to this?"

Justice Gorsuch

We have before us a handful of individuals who have asserted a conscience objection. Normally, we would allow equitable relief to address them. Recently, I think what Justice Jackson's alluding to, we've had one might call it a rash of universal injunctions or vacaturs. And this case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on -- on -- on an FDA rule or any other federal government action.

Notably, Gorsuch isn't Jackson, Kagan, or Sotomayor. Roberts pile on shortly thereafter. Erin Hawley, speaking for the petitioner, more or less replied that since an anti-abortion emergency department doctor could be given a patient suffering complications of a mail-delivered Mifepristone abortion there's simply no way to provide legal relief except by banning mail-deliveries of the medication.

Well, I'm pretty sure this suit only addresses the mail delivery of Mifespristone (as I said, this one was on the edge of my radar) so I'm not sure how this would prevent these doctors from ever having to treat a patient that had undergone an abortion. Regardless, most of the justices seemed to settle on the massive disparity between Petitioners' grievance and their demand. Not Alito though, he spent all of his time trying to construct an authoritative medical decision that rebuts that of the FDA.

genesiskiller96

Alito Strikes me as a type of person who after they got to get a young person to unlock their phone, Red faced and embarrassed he goes on a [tirade] about how because they know how to write in cursive that makes them better.

This one will presumably be 6-3, keeping Mifepristone available by mail, with Alito dissenting because he knows more than the FDA, Barrett dissenting because it's the only way to prevent a moral dilemma for ED doctors, and Thomas dissenting because the FDA should have let the Comstock Act dictate their medical approval.

So between the issues mentioned here and fun cases like rearming wife beaters, someone seems to have gotten the idea that SCOTUS is eager to dramatically overturn the status quo and can fast track it through Texas.


Fleet Science Center, GBES at Fall Brewing, some dogsitting, and shoe shopping.

Spoilers if you look too closely:


We've filled out the map of the United States in Ticket to Ride Legacy and have one and a half rounds left. It's been a fun campaign and only really drags in those long sequences where everyone is just pulling cards. I unlocked the platinum achievement where my 3x cross country routes were destroyed by an earthquake event pulled on the caboose's bonus turn.

For our collective mental health day we stopped by a local escape room that was basically a walk-in arcade cabinet that combines Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime and Barotrauma.

Baldur's Gate: I am the batman

Well I'm not exactly Batman because Batman doesn't kill and I've done very much the opposite. Back in Act II I said:

Me	I'm anticipating a lot of reemergent plot arcs when I get to the city center. It could make for a busy calendar but one full of story/choice payoff. And I do hope that at least some of my 'good' choices come back to bite me in the ass.

In retrospect it wasn't that bold of a prediction, though in my defense I did not realize 70% of the game takes place in Baldur's Gate. But yeah, everything converges in the city and it's mostly about vanquishing my allies' arch nemeses.


Cazador? Killed him. Hag? Re-killed. Raphael? No longer singing showtunes. Shar's lieutenant? You guessed it. Lorroakan? Batman death. Fish people? Wasn't going to kill them but since exploding the Steelwatch Foundry cut off access to the Sealab area I had to get sushi somwehere.

On a lore note, Baldur's Gate (city) seems overrun with oligarchs that have interesting hobbies. On a gameplay note, this makes for neat mini-dungeons (or estates) and boss battles without slogging through wildlands.

Gunfire: we finally beat Gluttony

After quite a few runs that more recently ended with the polar bear final boss, me and J at last got to shoot Gluttony right in his mouth. Our ascension builds were pretty dialed in by that point, so we could basically point and shoot rather than dodge attacks and work together.

Helldivers: afk mostly

Cattle's unending renovation combined with the lack of crossplay crossfriending support means I haven't gotten much HD2 in. But since they recently added mechs and have a drivable technical coming down the pike, I'm happy to keep this one mostly on ice.

Remnant: exploring

Unlike Helldivers, crossfriending does work in Remnant... as long as you are running the Epic client. This is apparently good for J since the in-game text is unreadable on the Deck. We started a new campaign with J's new character and, delightfully, haven't seen any repeated areas.

It's been a week and a half since SCOTUS ruled on Trump v. Anderson. The general media sentiment (left, center, right) has largely focused on the temporary abandonment of textualism and originalism because, "nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos". To my dismay, I didn't find anything discussing (what I perceived) to be the Court's repeated characterization of the Fourteenth as a transfer of power as the reason it's different from the Constitution and Twenty-second. So take that last post with a grain of salt.

The law subreddit had a link to a gigantic text wall with spelling and grammar errors and a profile pic that didn't shout "law degree" or "academia". Some of the comments were like, "Oh Seth..." so I guess he has some media exposure. Nonetheless, the comments section delivered the author's interesting point:

FuguSandwich

[I'm not a lawyer], but the 3 relevant excerpts from that wall of text that form the basis of the author's argument seem to be: In Trump v. Anderson (text), the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Congress must make "some kind of 'determination'" that an individual has "engaged in" the act of "insurrection" before state officials are empowered to remove such a person from a federal general election ballot pursuant to such federal guidance and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. ... Of course, Trump v. Anderson, which establishes as a constitutional floor that a vote of Congress sufficient to pass legislation-thus, a majority vote-is required to find that an individual engaged in insurrection under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, is now settled law. ... And on January 13, 2021, a majority of the United States House of Representatives (232-197) voted that Trump had engaged in the act of Incitement of Insurrection. And on February 13, 2021, a majority of the United States Senate (57-43) voted that Trump had engaged in the act of Incitement of Insurrection. It seems to me that "some kind of determination" is doing a lot of work here. SCOTUS didn't really define it, but this probably is not what they had in mind.

Huh. Much of the punditry has covered how the conservative justices went the extra mile (beyond saying states can't use 14.3 on candidates for federal offices) to say that 14.3 is not self-executing. Legislation to enforce 14.3 would require a majority vote in both houses and it seems that, while the Senate failed to convict with 2/3, they did meet that majority threshold.

There are probably a host of technical issues with this claim but on principle I wouldn't call it unsound.

Adam Unikowsky

In Griffin's Case, Chief Justice Chase, acting as a lower-court judge, concluded that Section 3 was completely inert until Congress took action, such that it could not be applied to the state-court judge who was the insurrectionist in that case. The Supreme Court, by contrast, held that states could apply Section 3 to state-court officials, implying that Section 3 is self-executing as applied to state-court judges like the judge in Griffin's Case.

Yeah. Strange that 14.3 is not self-executing federally but is(?) self-executing for intrastate applications. I liked this post, it had some light humor:

Adam Unikowsky

There's nothing wrong with thinking that a 9-0 Supreme Court decision is wrong-there are several unanimous decisions with which I personally disagree-but the fact that all nine Justices agreed on the disposition of the case is surely a point in favor of that disposition. Of course, four Colorado Supreme Court Justices went the other way, but it's universally recognized that U.S. Supreme Court Justices are better at judging than lower-court judges; otherwise, how could they have become Justices?

Back in January I linked an Atlantic op-ed that referred to Petitioner's question (for the court to address) as a 'Cuisinart question'. The author suggested that the ambiguity of the question was possibly the result of bad/passthrough lawyering or, more likely, that the arguments were individually quite weak. I offered a fourth possibility, "We don't know what grounds you'll use to overturn the CSC decision so we'll leave a blank sheet and just go ahead and fill in your justification."

Adam Unikowsky

One reason I gave a 20% chance of Trump losing is that all of Trump's legal arguments had serious weaknesses. The Supreme Court dealt with this problem by basing its opinion on a rationale not proposed by Trump. The Court didn't even mention the two lead arguments in Trump's brief, i.e., that Trump isn't an "officer of the United States" and that Trump's Tweets didn't rise to the level of insurrection.

Certainly there would have been substantially more spillover if the court had made a decision on the 'officer' thing or the insurrection thing. This decision seemed to follow the Bush v Gore 'nonprecedential' mold by narrowly targeting 14.3 as it applies to federal offices. That said, commentators have pointed out that the verbiage used in 14.3 appears elsewhere in the Constitution.

Adam Unikowsky

The Supreme Court ruled in Trump's favor on the ground that a state court could not disqualify a federal candidate under Section 3 because the Fourteenth Amendment didn't "affirmatively delegate" the authority to do so. This argument is difficult to swallow. The Federal Constitution is the law of the land. It governs not only the federal government, but also the states. States do not need permission to apply the law that binds them. Indeed, the Supreme Court has frequently held that state courts must apply federal law, even if they don't want to. ... The Supreme Court acknowledged that states run presidential elections under the Electors Clause, but declared that "there is little reason to think that these Clauses implicitly authorize the States to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates." I don't get it. There is no "implicit" power being claimed. The state has the explicit power to run presidential elections. That includes the power to ensure that the presidential election operates according to law. Law includes federal law, including federal constitutional law.

If nothing else, there seems to be consensus that this ruling is exceptional.

Adam Unikowsky

But it's artificial to suggest that "the law" excludes considerations of practical consequences, at least when those consequences are sufficiently severe. And if there's ever been a time to be on Team Statesmanship, this is it. So I could be persuaded that this case is the 1%. The best reason to be a doctrinal purist 100%, rather than 99%, of the time, is that diverging from doctrinal purity even once opens up a Pandora's Box. It sets the precedent that courts can use preferred outcomes to drive reasoning whenever they want.

The erosion of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court continues, with and without Harlan Crow.

Prof Jill Lepore

If the Court is now interested in consequentialist arguments, here's one: in the past quarter century, more than three hundred thousand American children have experienced armed civilians attacking their schools.

The Atlantic

Referring to the potential problems that could be caused by individual state enforcement of the prohibition, the justices write that "nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos-arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration." Not that this should have mattered to the Court's originalists, whose commitment to that doctrine supposedly prevents them from deciding cases on the basis of their personal preferences rather than the law itself.

The Justice Gorsuch quote has made the rounds, "Suppose originalism does lead to a result you happen to dislike in this or that case. So what?"

The Atlantic

They felt that a plain reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment would lead to chaotic or adverse outcomes, so they not only ignored it but also essentially amended the Constitution by fiat. Justice Amy Coney Barrett... wrote separately, and seemed to urge the media to avoid stating the obvious, that the justices were doing politics rather than law. In what will hence be referred to as the Streisand Concurrence. Although I feel like describing this as politics both weakens the argument and misses the greater point (which is the specific purpose of the editorial); the justices abandoned originalism.

Source.

"We ain't found shit!"

I wanted to (cross)play some Helldivers 2 with J. I already have it for Steam, he bought it for PS5 since Steamdeck compatibility is spotty.

When either of us clicked 'Accept' on our respective friend requests, nothing happened. What the heck?

Google gave me a whole bunch of AI-generated non-answers that started with describing Helldivers and proceeded to talk about the importance of co-op play. We've talked about this before, LLMs are sometimes pretty good via chatbot, they're atrocious when laundered through Google search and SEO.

Despite its 'enshittification', there's the old standby, "put 'Reddit' in your query". That gave me this post which recognizes that there is an issue and suggests workarounds.

• Toggle crossplay (to presumably reset the Steam-PSN link) and retry.
• Have one player run a trivial difficulty mission and the other look to find the joinable session. on the corresponding planet map. Then add from recent contacts.
• If a third account can see both, play a session together and add from recent contacts.

None of those applied to or worked for us. Zooming in and out of a planet showed a handful of joinable games, after a few cycles I'd seen most of them already. When I re-logged I saw completely new names, suggesting I hit a different server and would likely not find my PS5 buddy. To make matters worse, we're in different regions so it's probably a lost cause.

This story/rant/faq doesn't totally relate to the rest of this post, except that search and SEO content are recurring themes in my Web 1.1 saga.

To summarize my site's external link recommender in one line: I've been working on an unambitious web crawler to provide 'further reading' links for all of my posts. Most recently, I created a directed graph to associate posts by similarity and thereby accelerate insert and lookup.

For the most part, the past month has been spent crawling and refining my filter algos.

Subsurface

Content classification has been a winding path. My original intent for this project was to elevate the 'personal web' but also provide references to informative mainstream content. I wanted to offer these links as separate lists; Joe Schmo's blog on one side, The New Yorker on the other. I expected the means of partitioning the two to just, you know, work itself out.

It's not a straightforward problem. There are plenty of renowned tech personalities writing good content on their FAANG employer's blog. On the other hand, lots of companies have blogs that are just attempts to game SEO. And plenty of personal bloggers are just AI-assisted affiliate link garbage (see my experiences with the blogging subreddits).

While I haven't solved the partitioning problem, I think I can reduce its severity by offering results that don't suck. And that can be maximized by only indexing content that is some combination of informative, entertaining, and authentic. And to ensure I'm still linking the subsurface web, I added a rudimentary partition algorithm and will try to pull at least two of my three end-of-post external links from the indieweb.

Source.

I've come across some neat links as I've worked on this project.

Source.

It's just a photomosaic but, you know:

• It runs from your browser. Without a login or whatever.
• Middle-out is an option. Legitimately but also tee-hee.
• It's graphics stuff using code, something that I like doing.

And then there's this guy who is into gaming, exploring the indieweb, software, and renouncing/eulogizing Reddit. Also he does like marine search and rescue or something.

What do Ukraine, Orwell, and (I think probably) hockey have in common? This entertaining opinionpost.

I've mostly focused on crawling posts, but my image crawler has stumbled upon some cool images.

Note: Some of the exact urls disappeared as I was working on the code and so some links only go to the domain.

Source. I'm not sure what this is about but it is a cool book cover.

Source. Horizon screenshots, yes please.

Source. This has professional/commercial written all over it but it's neat nonetheless.

Source. This is from Flight Simulator? Whoa.

Source. Eep.

Source. ...

Source. I guess two neat architecture photos made it in this list.

Source. Look I don't know what's going on here but I like it.

Source. Nostalgia intensifies.

Source. This guy probably wants someone to helicopter a diesel generator to him.

Source. Chippies rescuing someone from Shasta.

SCOTUS handed down its ruling on Trump v. Anderson today; unanimously deciding that states cannot remove officers of the federal government based on the Fourteenth Amendment. I fear I'm doing way too much scotusposting these days but since I've been following this one I have to close the book on it.

SCOTUS

Proposed by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the States in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment "expand[ed] federal power at the expense of state autonomy" and thus "fundamentally altered the balance of state and federal power struck by the Constitution."

The per curiam opinion more or less says that viewing the Fourteenth Amendment as anything except a transfer of power from states to the federal government is simply wrong.

SCOTUS

This can hardly come as a surprise, given that the substantive provisions of the Amendment "embody significant limitations on state authority." ... The Fourteenth Amendment grants new power to Congress to enforce the provisions of the Amendment against the States. It would be incongruous to read this particular Amendment as granting the States the power-silently no less-to disqualify a candidate for federal office.

Reading this reminded me of the ideological debate about how to teach grade school students the causes of the Civil War, namely if it was mostly about slavery or states' rights. While it would be no shock to see someone at a Texas PTA meeting describe the Civil War Amendments as a power grab by the federal government, I would expect SCOTUS to take a broader view of the things that ended slavery and enshrined equal protection of the law.

SCOTUS

Section 3 of the Amendment... was designed to help ensure an enduring Union by preventing former Confederates from returning to power in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Even barring oathbreakers from office is written like it's a consolidation of federal power. Why the focus on the balance of power? It's not like rooting out insurrectionists can't be done by both the state and federal government. Let's briefly rewind to the requirements for being president:

1. Age 35 and natural born citizen, per the Constitution.
2. Not an oathbreaking insurrectionist, per the Fourteenth Amendment.
3. Not running for a third term, per the Twenty-second Amendment.

So the first one has been enforced by states regularly throughout history, including the recent case with that Gorsuch quote that's been floating around. The third one doesn't come up too often, but perhaps SCOTUS would be okay with states enforcing post-FDR term limits. And so we have consistency across requirements defined in the original text of the Constitution and Amendment Twenty-two, Amendment Fourteen should be the same deal, right?

"The Fourteenth Amendment is different."

Backing in to a decision

SCOTUS

The only other plausible constitutional sources of such a delegation are the Elections and Electors Clauses, which authorize States to conduct and regulate congressional and Presidential elections, respectively. But there is little reason to think that these Clauses implicitly authorize the States to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates. Granting the States that authority would invert the Fourteenth Amendment's rebalancing of federal and state power.

So since the Fourteenth Amendment was only about empowering the federal government, the Constitution's election framework that probably applies to later amendments does not apply to this one.

SCOTUS

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.

One might expect that the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment would be cognizant of the Constitution and, if they were creating an exception to the rule, would have stated such. SCOTUS took a different view:

SCOTUS

... the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, on its face, does not affirmatively delegate such a power to the States.

Nor does the text of the Twenty-second.

In defense of the view described above, the Court's opinion claims that the 2/3 Congressional vote required to remove the ineligibility is an indication of the amendment's intent for it to be exclusively federal. Further, it claims that state power to remove a candidate would burden the federal legislature with hearing requests for relief. The argument references the case of one Nelson Tift:

SCOTUS

Shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, for instance, Congress enacted a private bill to remove the Section 3 disability of Nelson Tift of Georgia, who had recently been elected to represent the State in Congress.

I wondered how Tift had been disqualified in the first place. This predated the Enforcement Act of 1870 which was ostensibly the legislation that proves Section 3 is not self-executing. The internet didn't have a readily-available answer, so of course I asked an LLM:

Copilot

Nelson Tift was an American businessman, sailor, and politician who is best known for founding the city of Albany, Georgia. During the American Civil War, Tift was a captain in the Confederate States Navy supply department. He built gunboats for the Confederate navy and supplied the Rebel army with beef and hardtack produced by his factories at Albany and at nearby Palmyra in Lee County. After the war ended, he was elected to the 40th United States Congress as a U.S. Representative with the Democratic Party and served from July 25, 1868, until March 3, 1869. However, he was not permitted to qualify for re-election in 1868 and unsuccessfully contested the election of his replacement, Richard H. Whiteley. The reason for his ineligibility likely stems from his service in the Confederate States Navy during the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, includes a clause (Section 3) that disqualifies from federal and state office any individual who had taken an oath to support the Constitution, and who later engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gave aid or comfort to its enemies. This would have applied to many former Confederates like Tift who sought to hold public office during the Reconstruction Era. However, the same section of the Fourteenth Amendment also provides that Congress can, by a two-thirds vote of each House, remove such disability. This is likely how Tift's eligibility to hold a seat in Congress was restored. Unfortunately, I couldn't find specific details about the vote that restored Tift's eligibility. For more detailed information, you might want to consult primary source documents or specialized historical studies.

As is the norm with GPT queries, the first response was generic and did not answer my question but in my follow up I got an answer:

Copilot

The determination of Nelson Tift's ineligibility to hold office was not the result of a criminal or civil trial. Instead, it was a consequence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, specifically Section 3. This section automatically disqualified any individual from holding federal or state office if they had taken an oath to support the Constitution and later engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gave aid or comfort to its enemies. This provision was applied broadly to many individuals who had served the Confederacy during the Civil War, including Tift due to his service in the Confederate States Navy. The enforcement of this provision did not require a trial; it was essentially an automatic consequence of having supported the Confederacy.

Obviously, this could be a hallucination just as easily as it could be a direct reference to a legitimate publication. It does seem like a glaring omission from the SCOTUS footnote, however Tift's fate actually played out.

To their credit, the per curiam judgment does acknowledge another example of a state-originated disqualification of a federal officer:

SCOTUS

We are aware of just one example of state enforcement against a would-be federal officer. In 1868, the Governor of Georgia refused to commission John Christy, who had won the most votes in a congressional election, because-in the Governor's view-Section 3 made Christy ineligible to serve. But the Governor's determination was not final; a committee of the House reviewed Christy's qualifications itself and recommended that he not be seated. The full House never acted on the matter, and Christy was never seated.

It's just weird see this/these cases dismissed while Griffin and the Texas-history-book aesthetics of the Fourteenth Amendment are considered conclusive.

SCOTUS

The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record). The "patchwork" that would likely result from state enforcement would "sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States" as a whole.

I personally wouldn't characterize representative government and the electoral college as 'a direct link'. Certainly there are flaws with any system, but calling the link 'direct' is especially galling under these circumstances:

1. People went to the polls and voted for the next president.
2. Their votes were tallied and then bundled into a choice for their state as a whole.
3. The state decisions were sent to a bunch of dudes in a room to count. This is normally a formality and wouldn't be considered an elongation of this direct link. Except...
4. The losing candidate decided that he'd send another set of bundled votes to be counted. And then a single person from his administration could simply choose to not count certain votes. Failing that, the entire process could be dragged out until a group of nine unelected government employees would make the final decision.

Beyond the reversal

Having states adjudicate nontrivial qualifications for federal government was never going to work out. Age and term limits are straightforward but insurrection and maybe even natural born citizenship could have fifty different decisions. And so on the grounds that states shouldn't decide federal elections, all of SCOTUS agreed that the Colorado Supreme Court had "erred in their decision". Or, more likely, the CSC had made the correct, impractical decision.

Officer/office under

The former president's attorney argued that Section 3 doesn't apply to presidents and for another reason it doesn't apply to his client (and George Washington). In oral agruments Justice Gorsuch seemed extremely interested in this line of reasoning. As far as I can tell, the applicability of Section 3 to the president isn't addressed in this ruling. Perhaps there is an implication in this statement: "For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States."

Self-execution and Jack Smith

Another significant question raised in oral agruments was whether Section 3 required separate legislation to enforce it. Having already decided that states can't apply 14.3 to federal elections, the per curiam opinion still passed judgment. The liberal justices disagreed:

Justices Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor

The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment. Section 5 gives Congress the "power to enforce [the Amendment] by appropriate legislation." Remedial legislation of any kind, however, is not required. All the Reconstruction Amendments (including the due process and equal protection guarantees and prohibition of slavery) "are self-executing," meaning that they do not depend on legislation. The majority also cites Senator Trumbull's statements that Section 3 " 'provide[d] no means for enforcing' " itself. The majority, however, neglects to mention the Senator's view that "[i]t is the [F]ourteenth [A]mendment that prevents a person from holding office," with the proposed legislation simply "affor[ding] a more efficient and speedy remedy" for effecting the disqualification. It forecloses judicial enforcement of that provision, such as might occur when a party is prosecuted by an insurrectionist and raises a defense on that score.

By many accounts, minimizing their reach is how the court is support to operate. On the other hand, there is a stalled/ongoing criminal prosecution against a leading presidential candidate for the very insurrection addressed in the Colorado ruling. So the bonus determination that 14.3 is not self-executing could be significant; certainly Congress isn't going to pass an insurrection law between now and November (ignoring ex post facto concerns). Luckily, they don't have to:

18 U.S. Code 2383

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

The per curiam opinion specifically calls out the federal insurrection statute that closely echoes 14.3. This presumably means insurrection charges will be added to the January 6 prosecution once/if it is restarted.

As I discussed previously, the Enforcement Act of 1870 permitted civil procedures to have 14.3-ineligible candidates removed from the ballot or office. I expect that the self-execution ruling means there cannot be a federal civil suit filed against any of the perpetrators of January 6 without new legislation.

In another concurring opinion, Justice Barrett sought to reassure Americans that they should sleep well knowing that the Supreme Court is unified:

Justice Barrett

I join Parts I and II-B of the Court's opinion. I agree that States lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates. That principle is sufficient to resolve this case, and I would decide no more than that. This suit was brought by Colorado voters under state law in state court. It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced. The majority's choice of a different path leaves the remaining Justices with a choice of how to respond. In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.

I'm not sure that deciding to hear the "absolute immunity" claim in late April after the government's petition in December is going to turn down the temperature.