Someone, anyone, could bring a court suit saying trump is ineligible under the 14th Amendment. There would be a hearing or a trial and a decision. The authors of the paper under discussion here, extremely conservative members of the Federalist Society, submit that the ineligibilty doesn’t need to be due to a conviction and can only be set aside by a 2/3 vote of Congress and that the Amnesty Act was a one time deal specific to the Confederates after the Civil War. I’m sure there are other lawyers who disagree. I’m also sure we’re more likely than not going to see this play out in at least a few states. The conservative members of the Supreme Court are also Federalist Society members and may feel that their colleagues have made a good point.
Have the individual state’s sec of state decide, and if the state legislature has a problem with it, they can fight it out. Him being off the ballot should be default (in a rational world).
I sure hope Traitor trump is disqualified from all 50 states’ ballots. I don’t care so much about Micronesia. Which he would be in anything approaching a rational country.
The problem is that he/they won’t take disqualification lying down and the issue of who is empowered to issue a final ruling on what basis will be being thrashed out in umpteen disparate courts working against rather close deadlines. With little precedent to work with and therefore differing legal theories and rationales even among those who find against the traitor. And where every decision against the traitor will also be appealed.
Folks keep hoping for a magic legal amulet that will, like a crucifix before a vampire, immediately and permanently nullify the danger. There ain’t no such talisman.
This is going to be the legal equivalent of the house-by-house fighting to clear Al-Sadr’s goons out of Falluja.
Primaries? It would result in a more electable Republican nominee.
General election? What happens to the vice-president nominee on the ballot?
What if Trump was kept off a general election ballot, and the GOP won the state? One possibility is that the electors would vote for Trump anyway. Another is that the election would get pushed to the House, where, due to the one-state one-vote rule, the GOP is highly likely to win.
My modest proposal is to leave it up to the voters to vote for whom they wish. Like democracy as a whole, every other system is worse.
It wouldn’t be terribly restrictive to keep traitors off the ballot. There’s really not that many of them, denks Gott.
Doesn’t it say that the person must have previously sworn an oath?
So, someone who has never held office before commits insurrection, and they aren’t barred from future office? Is that how it works?
Good point.
You could interpret it to say that the aid or comfort to enemies clause isn’t subordinate to the oath phrase. But, grammatically. It looks to me to all go together. I say that insurrectionists, who never held office before, are in the clear to run.
Trump held office, but he didn’t directly engage in insurrection. When it came time to march on the Capitol, he chickened out. But he did give aid and comfort.
Then the question is — did he give aid and comfort to our enemies? I say no, because Congress has not declared a war.
Stopping someone from running for office, on the basis of ambiguous law, is hostile to democracy.
If conservative lawyers are going to take the words of the 14th Amendment literally, then it looks really bad for Trump wanting to dismiss birthright citizenship, which leads off Section 1. We should all remember this discussion when that comes up again.
Then what’s to stop them from declaring Biden ineligible? They could allege that Biden’s border policy or something is “aiding or abeding our enemies.” The Federalist society specifically mentions “inaction” as viable. Without some sort of check, this seems like a horrible idea.
The difference with other eligibility requirements is that they are objective. This one isn’t.
(Note, this idea came from Beau of the Fifth Column’s video.)
Is it? Objective, I mean, without ambiguity?
Was McCain a “natural born citizen”? Not born in the US, and his citizenship may have depended on a retroactive federal statute.
Is it age 35 at time of nomination, or of election, or at the moment of inauguration?
And how do you calculate 14 years? Is it 14 years continuous, or can it be broken up, but cumulative to 14 years?
And is Barack Obama eligible to be on the ballot for vice-president?
Either there is some official who can enforce these provisions, or they are meaningless.
And who better to enforce them than the office elected or appointed under state law to manage state elections, including ballot eligibility?
Good point to me. If you google Biden and traitor, some are already saying it. If a Republican was somehow stopped from running, the same is almost sure to happen to a Democrat in some heavily red state. As explained before, this would hurt local Democrats downballot in that state, even if the Democrats had no state-wide victory chance.
It’s the old what goes around, comes around. I posted before about how once a President is jailed, in any particular country, another one is highly likely to be jailed again within a decade or two. But I can see that not hurting in terms of democracy. American voters have voted candidates residing in lockup into office before, and they can do it again. However if we start up with disqualifying people from running, this puts us on a more anti-democratic dynamic.
Section 3 of the fourteenth amendment was a special purpose provision attempting to prevent a reversal of the results of the U.S. civil war. It didn’t do a great job there, and is of negative value today. I hope it will be interpreted in a narrow way so that it remains effectively a dead letter.
What I mean is that the actual facts in question are settled. You may debate about how the law should be interpreted (though see below), but there’s no question about where and when McCain was born, when the person turned 35, how long they’ve lived in the US, or whether or not Obama would be running for Vice president (nor whether he had already served 2 terms as president).
But whether Trump actually “ha[s] engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” would seem to be (at least in part) a question of fact.
If you are arguing about how the Constitution should be interpreted, that would seem to obviously be in the realms of the Courts. Sure, an executive would make their own decision at first, but then it could be challenged.
If we also do that with questions of fact, however, it would seem to me that this would effectively not be self-executing. You would still ultimately need a Court to establish the facts in question—assuming they didn’t just say that a conviction is required.
Once there is a conviction (and all appeals are done), then there is no longer a question of fact.
All of that said, I was under the impression that all of your questions were effectively settled.
- The law in question made McCain a natural born citizen, so yes.
- It’s a requirement to the “Office of President,” not about being allowed to be on the ballot. So it applies at the point when he is sworn in, and not before. If he is ineligible at that point, then we’d follow the 25th Amendment.
- The text doesn’t say consecutive, so such would not be required.
- Nothing in the Constitution sets forth requirements to be Vice President, let alone run as such. He would not, however, be able to take over as President. (Whether he could be Acting President is, I believe, not settled.)
Right now, half (more or less) of the voting public supports Trump, but those half are mostly kept in an information bubble that’s carefully curated to prevent them from knowing about Trump’s misdeeds. But if Trump actually gets convicted of his various and sundry crimes, it will become difficult for even Fox News to keep that bubble intact, at which point some of Trump’s supporters will finally find out just how horrible he is, and some of those who find out will change their vote (at least from “voting for Trump” to “not voting at all”). The Federalist Society may have calculated that this is likely to happen, to a sufficient degree that Biden would win easily (which wouldn’t take all that much).
It’s not something we should take for granted or get complacent about, but neither is it something totally irrational to expect. And from the Federalist Society’s point of view, the proposed course of action (get some other fascist as the nominee instead of Trump) has very little downside, so it makes sense to hedge their bets.
It’s not just those who held office. Any current or former member of the military, for instance, is also someone who has previously sworn an oath to support the Constitution.
I see where it says he can’t be elected to the office of the president.
I don’t see where it says he can’t become president without being elected to the office of president.
Not directly related to the OP, but it is time to put President Trump in front of a court-appointed psychiatrist.
12th Amendment
But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
It seems pretty clear that any two-term former President can’t be Vice-President.
I did so in order to serve on a town planning board.
Does anyone know if there are precedents showing that’s how it works in practice, perhaps in House or Senate races?
In the absence of such precedents, I think BigT is correct here, in terms of literal constitutional interpretation, but state election authorities would have varying perspectives.
If ineligible, then Trump never took office for his second term. I don’t see a clause in the 25th amendment that applies there.
I question whether there really is such a bubble. The problem isn’t lack of knowledge about, say, the Carroll verdict, but that they think any juror or judge, who isn’t a firm Trumper, is hopelessly biased. So real Trump supporters will be no more impressed by a Stormy Daniels verdict than they were by the Carroll verdict.
Voters who waver are highly cynical and already think they all are crooks, jury or no jury.
Having said that, I don’t rule out wavering voters being impressed by a felony conviction. My problem is that I can’t figure out why that would impress them when all the other terrible things they know about Trump didn’t. Maybe some do have a sort of very conventional morality where being a jailbird is a bright line. We may see.
What I don’t think we will see is Trump disqualified.
They stay in the ‘bubble’ because that’s where they want to be. To look at facts and information would make them look at themselves. Which they do not want to do.
No one wants to admit that they where conned by an idiot.
And sadly, plenty of racists and bigots out there that will vote for the person that holds the same views as they do.