I see that you have traded in the broad brush for a spray gun.
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Picky, picky, picky. There is a reason lawyers write in short declarative sentences. That way most people simply assume they have researched the claims they are making. Although in this case txlawyer might be right. Has anybody done an exhaustive search of any cases since 1866?
With respect to the disqualification clause, that power is constitutionally reserved to Congress, not the states. That makes it non-justiciable.
It doesn’t have anything to do with any ambiguity. The entire question of trump’s eligibility under the 14th Amendment is something only Congress can decide, either by disqualifying trump directly when it’s time to count the Electoral College, or through legislation establishing some other kind of mechanism for determining whether a candidate is disqualified due to being a dirty rotten insurrectionist.
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I believe so. I well remember that 8 - 0 vote and Rehnquist recusing himself. Pay attention to the Kagan example.
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Do you have a citation? Section 5 doesn’t use the word “exclusive.” It says in full:
" Section 5 Enforcement
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
It does not say the Congress shall have the exclusive or sole power, although I can certainly understand the Supreme Court coming to that conclusion. Unless you have a decision to cite there is no way you can say what you are saying with that level of certainty.
Checking the date, Ex Parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 339, 345 (1879). If 1879 is actually the date, approx. 10 yrs. after Virginia was readmitted to the U.S… And reconstruct had ended.
This seems to be a convenient work around to Section 3 written in to the 14th amendment. As in the make-up of the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1867-68; ( The Convention’s 104 delegates included 68 Republicans, among whom were 24 African Americans, 21 Virginia-born whites and 23 whites from out of state.[5] The remaining 36 Conservatives were mostly wealthy ex-Confederates.[6]
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by declaring that the meaning of “insurrection or rebellion” is ambiguous and that the ambiguity is something Congress must resolve legislatively.
That makes the most sense. SC doesn’t want to get involved but it’s simply an act of cowardice IMO. They were primed and ready for Roe but this they most likely wont touch. They overruled Roe and the consequences became a woman’s own personal problem. This is too big a deal for the SC with an uncertain outcome.
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Of course I have a citation! Ex parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 332, 345 (1879) (holding that the courts can’t enforce the 14th without Congress first passing legislation).
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Thank you.
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My question from the above statement is, why haven’t Section 1, 2, 4 needed enforcement from Congress?
And SCOTUS will find it a very convenient way to skip the hard questions while keeping trump on the ballot everywhere he’s otherwise qualified to be. Win/win!
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For whom?? Certainly not for the country…
They do! Congress has repeatedly passed legislation creating causes of action and the like. But the only thing currently on the books that might be an exercise of section 3 legislative authority is the criminal insurrection statute. But trump would need to be convicted for that crime before he he could be punished under it by being sent to prison and barred from office.
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The Political Question Doctrine being what it is, when I said it was about ambiguity I was endeavoring to look beyond the “what” to the “why.”
When evoking the Doctrine, the Court is effectively saying, “As hot potatoes go, this is nuclear. We don’t want to be the ones to decide what the words of the text mean, so we’re going to use this doctrine we created out of whole cloth in order to absolve ourselves of that responsibility.”
I say that because the Court doesn’t ever have to invoke a doctrine like this one. It could choose to say that Congress meant the word to have its ordinary meaning and look to the Common Law to define the term. I mean it does that exact thing all the time for other Constitutional provisions that don’t have enabling legislation.
If a former two-term President ran for a third term and a state kept them off the ballot, I doubt the Court would refuse the case for lack of enabling legislation. Same for if, say, an 18 year-old ran for President.
The Doctrine is a convenient out, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s one the Court made up for itself to use whenever it finds itself in inconvenient circumstances.
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And that’s the entire significance of there being not a single trial having come to any conclusion, due to the delays from the people who have the most to benefit.
At the end of it all, TIFG will be the nominee and he could very well win if enough people are threatened with their lives. I don’t necessarily mean that Biden won’t take the popular vote (he more than likely will), but who are the final arbiters of the election - the States and the Fed House. Didn’t we just hear yesterday of a dozen or more State governments threatened? Did we not have that ‘tourist visitation’ three years ago? All of which could happen again in some form.
If TIFG isn’t in prison by 1 November, he may well win the election; hell, he could win the election even if he is imprisoned because by the time these cases come to trial and get over all the appeals and such, it’ll be too late to remove him from the ballot anywhere.
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If he was convicted of the federal law against Insurrection I could see it.
Still I could also see that even in that case congress’s power to remove disqualification implying the prohibition is not on running for office but “holding” office. Thus a major party is free to risk a potentially having their winning candidate DQ’d and have instead their VP take the post…
The Supreme Court betrayed Stanky Skanky, Wanky, the Family, the Organization, and the Party. None of this would have happened if they had followed Ginni’s instructions from the insurrection. They should have done what Tony Scalia would have done.
Well, we couldn’t count on Chase
As Chief Justice, Chase also presided at the impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson in 1868. As the justice responsible for the 4th Circuit, Chase also would have been one of two judges at the trial of Jefferson Davis (who was imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Virginia), because trial for major crimes such as treason required two judges. However, Davis’s best defense would be that he forfeited U.S. citizenship upon secession, and therefore could not have committed treason. Convicting Davis could also interfere with Chase’s presidential ambitions, described below. After the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, Chase invited Davis’s lawyer to meet with him privately, and explained his theory that Section 3 of the new Amendment prohibited imposing further punishment on former Confederates. When Davis’s lawyer repeated this argument in open court, Chase dismissed the case, over the objection of his colleague, U.S. District Judge John Curtiss Underwood, and the government chose not to appeal the dismissal to the U.S. Supreme Court.[40]
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Ah, but those things aren’t in the 14th Amendment, are they?
ETA: And note that this punt technically won’t be under the “political questions” doctrine, as that only applies to federal subject matter jurisdiction. But declaring the issue non-justiciable as a result of the 14th Amendment will have the same effect.
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The best way is to vote him out, again. There is a shit load of aholes who would like to follow his example. I just do not think we can litigate our way out of this.
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