Um....don't the courts also decide if Trump gets convicted?So they need to hit on 00 again on the roulette table...cool.
2020 voters didn't stay home in 2022 and if that is historically what happens. (ask Nate Silver...oh wait he is probably ranting about COVID) But now we are so afraid it will happen in 2024 we need to keep a guy off the ballot...like that will somehow stop a coup.
Look, if Trump gets convicted keep him off the ballot. As of yet he has not been. Trying to stretch the laws to show he doesn't qualify makes us look as conspiratorial as they pretend we are. And make no mistake this is a friggin stretch and it is not something I want courts deciding.
"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."
USC 2383 was (so far as I can tell) passed in 1948, derived from something that passed in 1909, a good 40 years after the 14th amendment. The amendment does not say, "people who have been convicted of the crime of insurrection may not hold office." It says, "engaged in." There may not have even been a specific crime called "insurrection" in 1868. And clearly, many of the thousands of people who would have been disqualified under the 14th in say, the 1872 presidential election, were never convicted of a crime against the United States. If you held a federal or state office prior to 1865 and then gave aid or comfort to the Confederacy in any way, shape or form, the 14th was intended to keep you from re-joining federal or state government, conviction or no.
I think it's perfectly valid for a court to declare, as a point of fact, that former office holder (and oath-giver) X did give aid or comfort to enemies of the United States and is therefore ineligible to hold office again.
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