Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
That’s not how it works.
Let’s look at the 14th amendment, The plain text reading would be that anything characterized as an "insurrection or rebellion" would disqualify an official.
You think we should go with that, or is it the framers' intention reading which would be that obviously this was enacted in the wake of the Civil War, so the type of "insurrection or rebellion" the 14A's framers were referring to was something akin to the Confederacy's prosecution of the Civil War, which January 6 was not.
Legal scholarship really can't tell you anything useful to decide a case like this. We already know that this provision was enacted in response to the Civil War- the legislative history is going to be all about DQ'ing people who participated in it.
And you certainly aren't going to find any conclusive evidence of what they thought about "lesser" forms of insurrection or rebellion, because they weren't thinking about that. They were thinking about DQ'ing participants in the Civil War.
This is one of the reasons why Originalism doesn't work the way its proponents claim. A LOT of interpretation issues just involve situations where one canon points one way and another canon points another way. And you have to pick.
And someone won’t like it.
That’s the way it works.
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A textual originalist would not have the problem that you represent. He would not base the proper interpretation on "
anything characterized" as an "insurrection or rebellion". He would refer to the definition of those words that existed at the time the amendment was written. One of the tricks that Progressives use to twist and torture the Constitution in order to justify the passing of something that is actually unconstitutional is to use current shades of words that were not contemplated at the time the Amendment was created. This is also one of the reasons why they claim that the Constitution is too difficult to interpret.