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Supreme Court to Hear Momentous Case on Whether Trump Can Hold Office
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Who's joining me in the betting pool for an (unfortunate) ruling of "only Congress can decide insurrections"?
I hate how uselessly vague the Constitution is. That "insurrection" needs to be defined and how there's no defined process to properly categorize these crimes is baffling.
At times it feels like the Constitution has as much care and thought put into it as a rushed English essay cranked out in the bathroom stall 15 mins before class.
You can't be clear enough when it comes to language when dealing with somebody interested in willful misinterpretation. That's the problem here.
That's very concerning to me because at what point does one stop pretending to be governed by rules if one refuses to acknowledge the meaning of words?
At some point you're just making things up.
We’ve been making things up this whole time. The only reason any of this works is because we all agree it does
The thing is, the 14th Amendment, Section 3 isn’t vague on this point:
Look at the wording - it’s clearly intended to be an automatic disqualification. The only way you could possibly arrive at the conclusion that the Office of the President is exempt from this section is by jumping through frankly absurd and facile semantic hoops.
Pointedly, the only way Congress should be involved (per the relevant section) is in rescinding the disqualification.
But I’m sure the Tribunal of Six will be more than happy to just say “fuck you, we don’t care”. At which point… well, they’re only appointed for life, and they did somewhat recently vastly broaden the scope of the 2nd Amendment, and political violence is on the rise, so I wouldn’t be shocked if one or more people decided enough is enough and conducted a “citizen’s kinetic impeachment”, as it were.
Regardless of how things ultimately turn out, things are definitely 10/10 fucky, and I absolutely hate it.
Alright, I'll play devil's advocate:
Yes, you are correct in your description of what Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says, and what it should mean. However, there is no legal (as opposed to a dictionary or layman's) definitions on what "insurrection" or "rebellion" are, whether the events of January 6th meet either of those definitions, what the definition of "engaged" is, whether the actions Trump took (or didn't take) meet that definition, and (as you already pointed out) whether the President is considered "an officer under the United States."
Failing any one of those conditions means Trump wins:
As you said, this is facile and semantic, but the unfortunate truth is that our legal system absolutely runs on semantics. We are heading for a Bush v. Gore Redux, especially when you consider how many of the current SCOTUS justices had a hand in that decision.
(And no, Trump shouldn't be allowed to run because traitors usually aren't able to do much of anything.) (edit: had to fix this sentence.)
This is what I was getting at.
I don't like the possibility of this being leveraged against a Dem in a swing state because something like abortion advocacy got distorted into "rebellion" against future generations or something.
And then there’s the historical folks squabbling about how you can’t change the constitution. The country changes but we’re all still working on late 1700s language, plus amendments.
They never meant the document to last this long. It's literally written inside the Jefferson memorial.