After listening to oral arguments I think it's clear the officer argument has no legs. That would require they disentangle a ton of contradictions in the constitution. Something that became very obvious listening to this is that the founders weren't giving a huge amount of thought into which offices are "offices under the united states" as opposed to just "offices".

Several justices were concerned about incongruity between the states on who can be on the ballot. This is incredibly stupid as that's literally the entire point of having 50 different state elections that all regulate their own ballot access. It's shameful that this concern would even come from a superme court justice, and a sign of the intellectual weakness of the current court that their concerns can frequently be answered by a high school civics class. Then again they've just flat lied about the facts of plenty of cases in the last few years, so it's not surprising they would feign ignorance of the design philosophy of the system.




The biggest concerns seemed to be about the process. Does congress have to act? How can states go about it? Is it self executing? These are hard questions, so I don't expect they will spell out what the actual process needs to be. I think they will just kick it back with a vague "not enough due process" or just say congress has to act. I fully expect this court to avoid doing their job and just kick it back in whatever way is most convenient.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 8 2024 11:28am

What's the difference between them?

There isn't a consistent one. Lots of justices asked questions and there isn't a consistent way to point which ones are which without violating other parts of the constitution.

The crux of the officer argument comes down to these sections.








So a senator or representative cannot hold another office, but the president pro tempore is specifically an office other than senate or representative but has to be held by them. Additionally, the president is described using the same language of just being an office. So we are stuck to either say that "office" is not a rigorously defined term in the whole of the constitution (the obvious answer) or that "office" is a term of art that has to be interpreted differently based on the specific passage in which it is used and actually every called out office holds a special arbitrary place as "office", "office of the united states", and "officer under the authority of the united states".

As the latter requires doing backflips to maintain consistency in the constitution, we obviously have to take the former, and conclude that the 14th amendment then clearly would apply to the presidency as it makes no sense for it to apply to the vice president but not the president.

So one holds the Office of Presidency, but is not an Officer?

This was an argument that was made. That "office under the united states" does not refer to the office of the president of the united states.

It's a hilariously weak argument that the justices didn't seem particularly convinced by.

My guess is that the supreme court has two main goals here: 1) they want to reject Colorado since allowing that ruling to stand would lead to pandemonium, and 2) they avoid making an actual ruling on whether Trump is guilty of insurrection like the plague.

Accepting the officer argument would be an easy way out for them, no matter how flimsy it is.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 8 2024 03:44pm

Based on the oral arguments today I don't think that's the standard they are going to set. I agree they will avoid the question any way they can though. I just think the easier way is to set up some kind of "not enough due process" standard where they say there needs to be more done.

TBH there are no good arguments here in favor of Trump. The 14th amendment has provisions that are self executing, it was obviously understood at the time by confederates and congress itself as being self executing, all other office requirements are self executing, states have near-plenary power to administer their own elections including ballot access.... etc. etc.

If we had a fully functional court they would lay out some sort of test for insurrection and instruct that using this clause to restrict ballot access beyond state laws requires you meet it.

We don't have a functional court though. We have a court that will pretend a teacher doing a prayer in uniform on school property immediately after a football game where students testified they were bullied for not participating is a "private showing of faith". So really nothing is beyond the dishonesty of the conservative justices on the current court.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 8 2024 03:48pm

Even then, they could still set the bar so high that Trump undoubtedly doesn't clear it.

Possible, but assuming we had a functional court the bar would be met by what he did.