Excerpt:
It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment]. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”
In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.
This is a fairly easy read for the legal layperson, and the best general overview I’ve seen yet that sets forth the various legal and constitutional factors involved in today’s decision, including the concurring dissent by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson.
It requires no conviction.
Doesn’t that put the 14th and 5th in conflict? I made the assumption that due process (5th) was assumed/required when the 14th was written.
being disqualified from an office is not covered by the 5th amendment
people under 35 are not being held out of office of the president for some crime.
It’s a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Requiring congress to vote to not allow him to run is legally the same as requiring congress to vote to not let allow a 5 year old to run. Neither Trump nor the 5 year old should have to be proven ineligible They’re simply not, under the law as written.
SCOTUS are a bunch of political hacks and they should be charged with aiding and abetting an insurrectionist.
So… what’s to stop a Texas or a Mississippi or a Florida from deciding that Biden has participated in an insurrection, and requiring no conviction, uses this as grounds for removal from the ballot in November?
As much as I want Trump off ballots and believe he’s an insurrectionist, it’s important to remember that anything that can be done to hamper his chances that requires no (or a low bar) legal framework can also be done to help his chances.
If a court in Colorado can sit down and decide he’s off the ballot because of their opinions, and that decision is enforceable and unassailable, then we’re establishing that a state court can strike any name from any ballot because they say so.
With that precedent, I would fully expect states with GOP leadership to appoint judges who would then find reasons to call some aspect of Biden’s presidency an insurrection (in a similar vein as the Mayorkas impeachment), and remove him from their state’s ballot.
Literally nothing. If they were able to they would do it already, in several cases they are kind of half-assedly trying. Mutually assured destruction isn’t the principle of operation when one side is generally acting in good faith and the other side is actively pulling the copper out of the walls.
The thing keeping them from doing that is they need some form of proof.
Nothing is stopping anyone from just lying about everything, except other people who refuse to go along with the lie. All social systems are inherently backed by community intolerance of dishonesty.
So are we going to keep kowtowing to Fascists?