Well, ok. But Roe v. Wade was a bad case, and always on shaky ground. Even RBG didn’t like it, as it was based on the ‘right to privacy’ extrapolated from the ‘penumbra’ of other constitutional protections. It should have been an ‘equal protection’ case on clearer constitutional footing.
I don’t think that statements that the President is NOT an officer of the United States holds up to serious constitutional scrutiny, especially since the Constitution, in article 2, uses the terms “his Office” and “the Office” 7-8 times in reference to the Presidency.
These two quotes together reminded me that Trump has already pulled a “will no one rid me if this troublesome priest” on those prosecuting him:
This was unquestionably an incident to violence, as a “citizens arrest” is an invitation for people to take the law into their own hands (in recent memory see: Ahmaud Arbery and the very-near kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer).
I agree and want to believe that to be the case, but those Constitution stomping insurrectionist assholes have a whole lot of money and a few Supremes in their pocket.
They will pull out all the stops and are willing to burn everything to the ground just to own the libz.
Hard to believe the US fought and won a war against a monarchy only for people to want to recreate the role of a king.
In the UK, the monarch cannot be personally prosecuted - but we solved most of the problems that caused by stripping them of almost all power. Ministers can be prosecuted both as ministers of the Crown and in a personal capacity. Given the woeful state of the country, it’s about time we exercised that power.
I’m late to the party here, but I’ll give my law student about to graduate perspective, for what it’s worth. So yeah, the main problem is that this clause of the 14th Amendment doesn’t specifically include the President or Vice-President by name. It does mention electors, members of Congress, and civil and military officers. And let me tell you, you could fill up multiple volumes of books in various areas of the law over who is and isn’t considered an Officer of the United States government. I took Administrative Law last year, and I swear that one question took up about a quarter of the entire course. It’s just never clearly defined anywhere in the Constitution. And the problem here is that it would have been trivially easy for the drafters of the 14th Amendment to explicitly include the President and the Vice-President. That they did not do so is the core problem here. Why didn’t they? It would have been so easy. So did they intentionally exclude them? If so, then they probably didn’t intend for this clause to apply to them. Was it an oversight? Well…maybe. It’s possible. You’d have to go back and look at other sources of information from the time the 14th Amendment was drafted and debated. It would be extremely helpful to read any floor debates or discussions that occurred in Congress. But even if you do find some indication that the drafters did intend it to apply to the President and Vice-President, it still then requires a Court to make that interpretation. And that has never happened. It may happen soon. With the current makeup of SCOTUS, I don’t like the odds. They’re probably going to go strict originalist with this, and say, “Well it doesn’t explicitly include the President and the Vice-President, and it would have been easy to include them in the language of the clause, so we have to assume the exclusion was intentional.” Except phrased in a more SCOTUS-y way. But that’s the core problem. Ambiguous phrasing of the Constitution. Sometimes a feature, often a bug.
That sword cuts both both ways, though, right? It would also have been so easy to explicitly exclude them if that was indeed the intent. In the absence of other information about intent, seems to me (as someone who has taken a whole ONE actual law class ) that the appropriate interpretation would be one that is consistent with the tenor of the rest of the document.
But I’m not a corrupt Supreme Court Justice with an ideological axe to grind, so what do I know?
Seems about right to me. The non-grammatical form of the second amendment makes pretty clear that it wouldn’t have been the first time those dudes dropped the ball.
I think it’s also possible that because what was in the forefront of their minds when they wrote it was keeping Confederates out of elected office in the reunified country, that the possibility of the President and Vice President engaging in insurrection or rebellion just did not occur to them.
And to be clear, my personal opinion is that this clause of the 14th Amendment should apply to the President and Vice President. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want it to. But I’m not any kind of an originalist, so I don’t have any issue with a Court making that interpretation even if that weren’t the original intent. I just kind of doubt the current SCOTUS is going to make this interpretation. They have surprised me before, though. Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and ACB are not quite as predictable as Thomas and Alito.
) that the appropriate interpretation would be one that is consistent with the tenor of the rest of the document.
