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Donald Trump banned from Colorado ballot in historic ruling by state’s Supreme Court (apnews.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://learnconlaw.com/78-the-disqualification-clause goes into this in detail - the short answer is that the federal supreme court will probably rule that the amendment doesn't specifically call out the president as a person who can be disqualified and overturn the decision.

There is an argument to be made that the president is a "federal officer" so the ruling does stand, and that the intent was to bar confederates from public office so it would be weird to read the law as disqualifying a person from low level state office but not from the presidency, but it seems unlikely that the court would choose to do that given how partisan it is

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

There is an argument to be made that the president is a “federal officer” so the ruling does stand

What's the argument that he's not a federal officer? Basically everything in the Constitution refers to the office of the presidency, so claiming the president isn't an officer sounds like some bullshit that idiots would come up with. Which makes sense why the republicans are trying that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The argument that could be made is that in most of the rest of the constitution, anything that involves things the president can or can't do explicitly says "the president", so having an extensive list of positions that could be disqualified that doesn't mention the president by name implies that the president isn't included.

It's not a good argument, and I suspect in saner times it would be pretty clear that the intent is that Trump can't run.