A Colorado judge has ordered the state’s top elections official to place former President Donald Trump on the 2024 primary ballot, rejecting a lawsuit from a group of voters who argued the Republican frontrunner is constitutionally ineligible to hold office under a Civil War-era insurrection clause.
“After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States’ did not include the President of the United States,” Wallace wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”
This has got to be the stupidest reasoning. How is the President of the United States not considered an officer of the United States?
He held office right? Ergo he is a office-r
The new article links to an academic article which describes the full legal theory, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3978095
The short version, from the news article, is this:
“It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”
The academic article goes on in some detail hypothesizing why this might have been the case. Basically at the time it was written, every former President had been some other kind of Officer first, and even today Drumpf is the sole exception, so the omission of the P and VP might have been a sort of compromise to make it easier to get that amendment passed. (Really surprising that Congressmen/women and judges are Officers in this sense, and even some State officials like State governor, but not the V or VP.)
The academic article does a good job of proposing that it’s not a simple oversight - remember that a former US President had joined the Confederacy at that time, so this sort of thing was exactly at the top of their minds.
As much as I would personally disagree with this, I have to admit that the legal arguments made seem very sound to my layman’s understanding of things. Really unfortunate, though I do see a silver lining here - most other challenges have dealt with how hard it is to define an insurrection and if Drumpf really participated or not. At least the judge here did indeed agree with the fact that Drumpf was part of an insurrection.
Perhaps States can pass laws that, in addition to requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns to be eligible to stand in that State, also require that candidates a) never took part in an insurrection or b) apologized for it. As Drumpf would never apologize, he’d thus not be eligible to stand.
“Commander-in-chief of the entire military is not an officer of the military.” lolwut.
