Supreme Court to Hear Momentous Case on Whether Trump Can Hold Office

silence7@slrpnk.net to politics @lemmy.world – 229 points – Supreme Court to Hear Momentous Case on Whether Trump Can Hold Office
nytimes.com

The case turns on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

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Oh and just for everyone to remember. The 39th Congress was the one that wrote the 14th Amendment. We weren't some weeks old nation by that point and we literally have the minutes from that Congress discussing the 14th Amendment.

It's not some open question as to "does 14A S3 apply to the President"?

Why did you omit to exclude them [The office of the President and Vice President]?

— Sen. Reverdy Johnson (D-MD)

Let me call the Senator's attention to the words 'or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States'

— Sen. Lot Morrill (R-MA)

Or does this apply to this instance or just the Civil War.

This is to go into our Constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present; and I should like to have that point definitely understood.

— Sen. Peter G. Van Winkle (R-WV)

It's not some "well what did they mean by such-and-such? Oh we have no record of that." No, no. We literally have the transcript for this one.

The only open question is "does Colorado get to determine if Trump committed an act to disqualify him or not". We literally have the answer for all the other stuff straight from the mouths of those who framed the 14th Amendment.

"Yes, but who cares what a bunch of old dead politicians from the past think"

- Supreme justices that claim to be consitutionalists.

"Originalists", not "constitutionalists".

What's the distinction? Originalist meaning the original, unamended constitution?

That seems outside their authority. Their purpose, as I understand it, is rule on the letter of the law for the current constitution. The lawmakers, I.E. congress/senate, are who can amend the constitution.

There are different, competing philosophies of judicial interpretation.

The current SCOTUS majority champions "originalism", which means that judges must apply the meaning intended by whoever wrote a law. This often turns judges into part-time historians, trying to delve into the minds and attitudes of people who are long dead. But in this case, it's pretty easy to determine that the Reconstructionists who wrote the 14th Amendment had no intention of letting an insurrectionist become president. So "officer" clearly includes the president.

Originalism is in contrast to "textualism", which means interpreting the actual text(s) of the law without worrying about what the authors intended. So "officer" must be defined according to how it's used elsewhere in the Constitution, which (surprisingly) may result in something that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended.

There are also other competing philosophies, but right now these two are in conflict. The interesting thing is that the SCOTUS has to side against Trump if it actually believes in originalism (as opposed to using it as a pretext for their antiquated ideas).

They can try to argue that Colorado doesn't have that right/ability, but:

The Constitution also specifies age, residency, and citizenship requirements to run for the House or Senate. Individuals who satisfy those requirements cannot be prohibited from running for office for failing to satisfy other qualifications. States can, however, impose reasonable ballot access restrictions that a candidate must fulfill in order to appear on the ballot, such as submitting a petition signed by a certain number of registered voters. The Supreme Court has aggressively enforced this restriction by invalidating various attempts to impose term limits on Members of Congress. In U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995), the Court held that the Elections Clause did not permit a state to refuse to print on the ballot the names of candidates for the U.S. House who already had served three terms there, or the names of candidates for the U.S. Senate who had already served two terms. -Source

And in Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, they argued:

the Constitution prohibits States from imposing congressional qualifications additional to those specifically enumerated in its text. Petitioners' argument that States possess control over qualifications as part of the original powers reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment is rejected for two reasons. First, the power to add qualifications is not within the States' pre-Tenth Amendment "original powers," but is a new right arising from the Constitution itself, and thus is not reserved. Second, even if the States possessed some original power in this area, it must be concluded that the Framers intended the Constitution to be the exclusive source of qualifications for Members of Congress, and that the Framers thereby "divested" States of any power to add qualifications.

Well guess what. The disqualification comes straight from the Constitution itself, and has not been restricted or amended by Congress. Ergo it is the only qualification limitation which matters, and a state is well within its authority to enforce it.

Yeah, but you're forgetting that the SCOTUS is corrupt and cannot be trusted to fairly evaluate the facts.

Imagine you can be kept off the ballot for being five signatures short of a full page, but doing an insurrection isn't a good reason. And the individual states can decide on the first thing but not the second. Wild.

This is challenging to search through, mind providing page numbers so I know where to look?

Of course they’re gonna say yes. They don’t need any death threats from a bunch of lunatics, there are too many billionaire funded luxury vacations to be had. They don’t have time for such nonsense.

But wouldn't that mean anyone with pending felony charges can run for office? Or can they already? I guess you are innocent until proven guilty. But is it a states right to decide who they put in the ballot? But didn't we fight a war to say that the states have to follow federal laws? But so many states already have laws that contradict federal laws. Man the US government is whack.

They're going to find some way to let him run. They'll overturn the trial judge in it being insurrection, they'll say the amendment needs legislation to back it up, they'll say say the word "the" doesn't really mean "the" like it did in 1492 or some such nonsense. It'll be 5-4 or 6-3, because the fascist right has the judiciary captured.

America entered the legal phase of fascism during Trumps presidency, and Biden and the democrats weren't able to correct it during this last best chance to do so. In my humble, ignorant, foreign opinion, this is it, this will be the next step in the long coming codification of fascist rule in America.

Good luck, hope I'm wrong.

They are going to force him on the ballot. It's going to be a ghastly piece of tortured crap.

The question is how they leave the door open for swing states to kick Biden off.

In the (unlikely) case SCOTUS rules to exclude him from holding office, do you think there would be an insurrection at SCOTUS? Imagine the broken windows in protest of the court “stealing the election.”

A court stealing an election? That's crazy.

2000 election year laughs.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The case turns on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Where Things Stand: Judge Tanya S. Chutkan rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and the Supreme Court declined a request from Jack Smith, the special counsel, to hear an immediate appeal of that ruling.

The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the first part of the ruling — that Mr. Trump had engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election; trying to alter vote counts; encouraging bogus slates of competing electors; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and calling for the march on the Capitol.

“President Trump asks us to hold,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, “that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land.

“Were we to adopt President Trump’s view,” the majority wrote, “Colorado could not exclude from the ballot even candidates who plainly do not satisfy the age, residency and citizenship requirements” of the Constitution.

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