Happy to be Wrong

The SCOTUS Colorado case involved almost no history, bad or good.

I was right—as who could not have been?—about the outcome of Trump v. Anderson. The Supreme Court has now ruled that Colorado can’t keep Trump off the primary ballot, and by extension that a state official can’t unilaterally block a candidate running for federal office when such an official believes the candidate has committed, as Trump did, insurrection. (“As Trump did” is me, not the Court, even by extension: the Court didn’t rule on whether Trump committed insurrection.)

I was also right in thinking that the three liberal justices were very unlikely to dissent, given the merits of the case and their remarks during oral argument—the ruling was unanimous—and while I’d like to say “who could not have been right” about that one, too, BAD HISTORY readers know the answer: the eminent historian Sean Wilentz, for one, who predicted brilliant history-making dissents flowing from the liberal side of the Court to make it all worthwhile in the grand scheme of things.

A writer, not a celebrated Princeton history professor, I lack the credentials for flights of fancy like that. I also lack the obliviousness to being wrong that will keep Wilentz and the other historians and law professors feeling just fine and dandy about, even vindicated and martyred by, their manifestly misguided efforts in this case.

Lawrence Tribe and others have already started the spin. Tribe, on Twitter: