'Bleeds fear': George Conway slams SCOTUS for surrendering to Trump

The Supreme Court issued a ruling built on sand to keep former President Donald Trump on the ballot, not out of any sort of constitutional logic or principles but because of "fear," wrote conservative lawyer George Conway in a scathing analysis for The Atlantic.

"I talked with a lot of people about the Colorado case over the past three months, and I didn’t come across a single person who appeared willing to wager that the Supreme Court would uphold the Colorado decision; even the most fervent advocates for Trump’s disqualification, the ones who believed (as I was ultimately convinced) that the Colorado decision was unimpeachably correct, did not imagine that the Court was likely to agree," wrote Conway, who has sounded off warnings about Trump for years.

Ultimately, he said, the ruling the Court issued was "utterly flimsy" — and it had to be. Because the justices were too scared of the political fallout of disqualifying Trump, and so worked backward to conclude he shouldn't be.

"I confess that, going in, I gave the Court a lot more credit than the Court eventually showed itself to be due," he wrote. "And the Supreme Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion — I can’t blame any of the justices for not wanting to put their name on it — makes that painfully, embarrassingly clear."

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The justices found that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment allows only Congress to disqualify candidates for insurrection, even though, Conway wrote, "The 14th Amendment does not say that ... The justices effectively carved out Section 3, without any textual or clear historical basis for doing so. The Court didn’t even reach that result in a way that makes any sense."

All of this makes it apparent, Conway wrote, that, "This case wasn’t about legal reasoning; it was about fear. Fear from all the justices, conservatives and liberals, about the impact on the Court of removing Trump from the ballot. And the second paragraph of Justice Barrett’s opinion bleeds fear onto the page. 'This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,' she writes" — a line that only makes sense if the justices view what they've done through a political lens.

Conway chose to end on one note he found positive: the Supreme Court did not do anything to overturn the Colorado courts' findings that Trump did, in fact, engage in insurrection.

"Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection. Just as Trump today stands as an adjudicated sexual abuser, so too he remains an adjudicated insurrectionist. It is up to us, as voters, to make use of those findings come November."