Why I changed my mind and think Trump should be thrown off the ballot
January 6 was an insurrection, rebellion against the election of a new president. Congressmen/women and Senators fled for their lives. No help came from city police or elsewhere to quell the insurrection. There is no question about what it was. Calling it a riot is an attempt to make it less then what it was, an attempt to overthrow the government.
Opinion | Why I changed my mind and think Trump should be thrown off the ballot
The Washington Post,
E.J. Dionne Jr., February 4, 2024
The argument from many is January 6 was not an insurrection or rebellion, and it was a riot. Hopefully, the deception resulting from a change of words does not take hold through verbal intercourse about insurrections and insurrectionist politicians. It was a planned insurrection as led by a former president. Former in the sense he lost an election. The 14th Amendment1 takes this into consideration and does name a president as not being above the law.
Opinion | Why I changed my mind and think Trump should be thrown off the ballot, The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr., February 4, 2024
It is annoying when your political judgments come into conflict with what you decide is right. That’s what has happened to me on the question of whether Donald Trump should be barred from running for president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
The section disqualifies from office those who took an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged “in insurrection or rebellion against the same” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
When a narrowly divided Colorado Supreme Court threw Trump off the state’s primary ballot in December on the basis of Section 3’s plain language, my initial reaction was, well, political — and skeptical.
Though I agreed that Trump had, indeed, engaged in insurrection, I thought it would be best for the country to have him go down to defeat again in a free and fair election. Keeping him on the ballot so voters could decide was the path to long-term institutional stability and might finally force a reckoning in the Republican Party.
Many people I respect continue to hold versions of this view. But the more I read and listened, the clearer it became that Section 3 was directed against precisely the conduct Trump engaged in. Its purpose is to protect the republic from those who would shred the Constitution and destroy our system of self-government. What Trump did in advance of the attack on the Capitol and on Jan. 6, 2021, legally disqualifies him from the presidency.
The record is clear that the legislators who wrote and enacted the amendment in the wake of the Civil War were not just thinking of the Confederacy’s leaders but also of “the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come.”
Those are the words of John B. Henderson, a Republican senator from Missouri, when he cast his vote for the amendment in 1866. They are recorded in a powerful amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by a distinguished group of historians of the era: Jill Lepore, David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust and John Fabian Witt.
The amendment’s authors, they argue, “hoped not only to prevent a resurgence of secessionism but also to protect future generations against insurrectionism.” It was intended “to bar anyone who has betrayed an oath to uphold the Constitution from becoming President of the United States.”
They back up these assertions with a compelling 34-page account of what the framers of the amendment intended and why they wrote it as they did. The essay should encourage conservatives on the Supreme Court, which hears the case on Thursday, to ponder words they love: “originalism” and “textualism.”
Other historically minded briefs made it harder for me to stick with my earlier, prudent view. A group of 25 historians, including James McPherson, the Civil War’s premier chronicler, and Nell Irvin Painter, a specialist in Black and Southern history, cite the congressional debate on Section 3 to show that it plainly applies to the office of the president. They offer clear evidence that implementing the section “did not require additional acts of Congress,” as some defenders of Trump claim.
Sherrilyn Ifill, a Howard Law School professor and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, shows how the clause to disqualify insurrectionists is closely linked to the 14th Amendment’s core purpose, “a bold and expansive promise of citizenship for Black people.” Its framers were preoccupied with the “ongoing resistance to full Black citizenship by southern states” and feared that “Black men who had been loyal to the Union … would be disenfranchised, while disloyal white former Confederates would be rewarded with the vote.”
Trump is a present-day embodiment of their fears, she wrote, having offered “a false narrative discrediting the votes cast in jurisdictions with high concentrations of Black voters,” including Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
And to argue that barring Trump from the ballot is “antidemocratic,” wrote professors Carol Anderson and Ian Farrell in another brief, is “ironic … as he (AB: trump) bears by far the most responsibility for attempting to subvert democracy on Jan. 6.” An effort to overthrow constitutional procedures, wrote Ifill, should be distinguished from political protests, even those “accompanied by sporadic acts of violence.” Demonstrators are not the same as a mob trying to hijack the government.
There are paradoxes galore on this matter. Believing Trump should be unable to run, for example, is the opposite of a partisan wish, since he is without question the weakest Republican whom President Biden could face. Another: Even if Colorado was right to block Trump from the ballot, it shouldn’t be allowed to do so on states’ rights grounds alone. This is a national question, and the court should not duck the fundamental issues at stake — though my hunch is that the court might look for a way to punt.
The biggest paradox of all: Throwing Trump off the ballot would seem, on its face, the opposite of democracy. Yet the whole point of Section 3 is to protect constitutional democracy from anyone who has already tried to destroy it. If its provisions don’t apply to Trump, they don’t apply to anyone. The court would not be disqualifying him. He disqualified himself.
Opinion | Why I changed my mind and think Trump should be thrown off the ballot, The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr., February 4, 2024
AB: 14th Amendment; Amici curiae are distinguished scholars whose expertise includes the histories of federal constitutional amendment, the laws of war, and the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“Page 34: With an eye toward establishing enduring fundamental law and ensuring domestic tranquility, they framed a provision designed to hold future insurrectionists accountable by the same means. They knew that no one in the United States is above the law, not even the President, and that no republican government can afford to return insurrectionists to office. As Missouri Republican John B. Henderson declared the day he cast his vote for the Fourteenth Amendment in the Senate, “The language of this section is so framed as to disenfranchise from office the leaders of the past rebellion as well as the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come.”100 May the curse of that hereafter never come again.”
Nevertheless, determination of fact in our democracy is left to juries, not judges. Without a jury finding of an insurrection-adjacent crime, invocation of the 14th amendment will reasonably seen as political.
Neither Robert E Lee nor Jefferson Davis faced a jury.
True and your next question (game show).
rick:
And judges can overrule a jury. “JNOV is the practice whereby the presiding judge in a civil jury trial may overrule the decision of a jury and reverse or amend their verdict. In literal terms, the judge enters a judgment notwithstanding the jury verdict.”
It has been done and one man went to his death because a judge overruled the jury’s life sentence. It has since changed in Alabama.
Then the special prosecutor should have charged him with incitement to insurrection.
That’s enough of an error to keep him on ballots all over the country.
How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks
NY Times – Aug 4, 2023
non compos mentis…… aka too old via popularity poll.
Gaining popularity: 86% for Biden, 62% for Trump.
What were the 14% thinking?
The list of reasons why Donald Trump should not be re-elected is practically endless.
But the odds seem pretty good that the five or six states he needs to win can make it happen.
Trump Says He Gave NATO Allies Warning: Pay In or He’d Urge Russian Aggression
NY Times – yesterday
Fred:
How much leniency do you think I have? Stop littering.
Seems pretty clear from the Supreme Court oral argument that he’ll stay on the ballot.
bill
thanks. we needed that. not that all of us seem to understand it.
but i do think the SC might have a point about letting individual states make the decision. that would invite chaos. so, i am afraid would just arresting him on a federal warrant and trying him in federal court. and yes, there is even a problem withjust keeping him off the ballot because he obviously led an insurrection: what would we do if one day someone like Trump steals an election and we try to keep him from getting away with it, and they charge us with insurrection? we can turn ourselves into a banana republic even when we are in the right.
meanwhile our friends and fellow countrymen…especially in the South…already live in banana republics and have done so since the end of Reconstruction. I am afraid we gotta do this (get rid of trump) democratically. which means at least working locally to win elections by, you know, convincing the people.