Regarding the Feb. 11 news article “Much unease in blue states as Supreme Court weighs the Trump ballot case”:
And their technicalities were not even accurate. Some justices asserted or implied that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was intended to apply only to appointed officers and not to elected ones. But that section’s wording refers to “any officer”; justices ignored a colloquy in the 1866 Senate wherein the word “any” was emphasized. They claimed that the president is not an officer, ignoring that Webster defines “president” as “the highest executive officer” and “any presiding officer” and that the amendment was written while President Andrew Johnson had referred to himself as the nation’s “chief executive officer.”
The amendment’s developers were concerned that some candidates for elective office who violated oaths to honor the Constitution would be very popular, as Mr. Trump is. The Supreme Court whitewashed Mr. Trump’s violation of the emoluments clause. Now, despite knowing that many members of Congress are obsequious to Mr. Trump, justices repeatedly implied that Congress should decide whether Mr. Trump is disqualified. They didn’t seem to recognize that they have any responsibility.
Gilbert Wootton, Annapolis
As the Supreme Court considers the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to implement the 14th Amendment’s Section 3 to exclude the former chief executive officer of the United States from state ballots for the next presidential election, public attention focuses exclusively on this amendment’s post-Civil War context. Yet, the threat of insurrection was a concern of the Founding Fathers as they crafted the Constitution.
Their classical educations had taught them of the inescapable struggles of long-dead empires against such internal strife. Though the Founders could not visualize insurrectional traps awaiting their new republic, they knew such menaces would arise. The best they could devise was introducing a body of respected but unelected electors as a vehicle for moderating the factional enthusiasms they could foresee in popular elections for the president. Alexander Hamilton gave evidence of the drafters’ hope that this had addressed this issue in Federalist Paper No. 9: “A firm Union will be of the utmost moment in the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection.”
James Madison went even further in Federalist 10 to address blunting the effects of factional excess by a majority. In 1861, the Founders’ premonitions of insurrections became concrete. The leaders of the surviving republic crafted and ratified the 14th Amendment. Applied in the wake of the Civil War, it has seen little use until now.
What places the 14th Amendment in question is only the fortuitous truth that the United States has had only infrequent experience with political actors as truly dangerous as the insurrectionist confronting us now. He assaulted the Founders’ electoral college defense against insurrection by his actions surrounding Jan. 6, 2021, and is attacking the 14th Amendment’s defenses before the Supreme Court now.
John J. Kohout III, Williamsburg, Va.
