surely you joke, mein failüre
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Comments by "surely you joke, mein failüre" (@surelyyoujokemeinfailure7531) on "Maine Secretary of State speaks out on threats after ruling Trump ineligible for primary ballot" video.
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@J-kd2qc Here's the text of 14.3 .. let's start there:
"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 two houses of congress must approve, by 2/3, the removal of that disability.
Clearly the disability does not specify requiring conviction, indictment, or even accusation, otherwise it would say so. It authors could have easily included those provisions and did not.
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@J-kd2qc From where did you get the notion that Congress must pass additional legislation to enforce presidential qualifications that are already laid out plainly in section 3?
Section 3 adjudications against former Confederates were rare in the aftermath of the Civil War. That is because it was widely understood that former Confederates who took an oath to support the Constitution before the Civil War were disqualified under Section 3 and therefore many likely did not seek office in the first place. In fact, ex-Confederates flooded Congress with thousands of amnesty requests to “remove” their Section 3 disqualification, demonstrating that they understood themselves to be disqualified even without a formal adjudication. In addition, the window for disqualifying ex-Confederates was small: the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868, and Congress removed the Section 3 disqualification for most ex-Confederates less than four years later in the Amnesty Act of May 22, 1872 (that statute withheld amnesty from Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis). So while only eight officials have been formally ruled to be disqualified under Section 3, thousands more were understood to be disqualified in the period between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868 and Congress’s passage of the Amnesty Act in 1872 that applied to former Confederates.
Historical precedent also confirms that a criminal conviction is not required for an individual to be disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. No one who has been formally disqualified under Section 3 was charged under the criminal “rebellion or insurrection” statute (18 U.S.C. § 2383) or its predecessors. This fact is consistent with Section 3’s text, legislative history, and precedent, all of which make clear that a criminal conviction for any offense is not required for disqualification. Section 3 is not a criminal penalty, but rather is a qualification for holding public office in the United States that can be and has been enforced through civil lawsuits in state courts, among other means.
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