Tour de Force

The Federalist Society

According to Wikipedia, “The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies (FedSoc) is an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.” It is today one of the most influential legal organizations in the United States.

Two of the law professors from the Federalist Society, William Baude and Michael Paulsen, quoted from the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which reads,

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability,”

The professors responded with the following:

“The bottom line is that Donald Trump both ‘engaged in’ ‘insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”

“Section 3’s disqualification rule may and must be followed — applied, honored, obeyed, enforced, carried out — by anyone whose job it is to figure out whether someone is legally qualified to office,” the authors wrote.

The man they’re discussing just wrote this:

This is the state the country is in right now. Taking Trump’s posting literally, we can only lament that he is one of the “violent criminals…roaming the streets while going untried, free, & treated with kid gloves.” Stay tuned, folks. The history is there for the writing.