Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous: Anyone who violates their oath to the Constitution by engaging in insurrection is disqualified from holding any office again. One need not be formally charged with insurrection or engage in violent behavior, and Section 3 applies for all time, not merely to the 1860s and former Confederates. These are the arguments put forth by several historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in a pair of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court.
The justices are set to hear arguments Thursday in a case of potentially historic proportions. If the Supreme Court agrees that former President Trump engaged in insurrection related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and his “Stop the Steal” campaign, he may be disqualified from returning to the White House. Officials in Colorado and Maine have disqualified Mr. Trump, and challenges to his ballot status are pending in 11 more states.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz contends Mr. Trump must be disqualified based on an originalist interpretation of Section 3. Mr. Wilentz, a scholar of American democracy, rejects arguments that disqualifying Mr. Trump would damage the country’s democratic institutions more than a second Trump term would.
“Look, this is the United States of America. We have a Constitution. The Constitution, on this point, is absolutely clear. People should have realized this back on Jan. 6. The one person who did was the historian Eric Foner, who made this point then. He said [Mr. Trump] just started an insurrection he should not be allowed to run for president again regardless of impeachment or any of that,” said Mr. Wilentz, whose essay in the New York Review of Books cites a definition of insurrection established by the legal scholar Mark Graber.
An insurrection “is 1) an assemblage of people; 2) engaged in resisting a federal law; 3) using force or the threat of force with intimidating numbers; 4) with a public purpose or, in the words of Justice Samuel Chase in 1800, an ’object of a great public nature, or of public and general (or national) concern,’” Mr. Wilentz wrote.
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