Excerpt:
It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment]. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”
In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.
This is a fairly easy read for the legal layperson, and the best general overview I’ve seen yet that sets forth the various legal and constitutional factors involved in today’s decision, including the concurring dissent by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson.
If we’re not already there, it’s certainly where we are headed.
If a state government decides to ignore a SCOTUS ruling – because that’s all the rage these days – what’s the government going to do, call out the National Guard?
I personally don’t know the answer to that these days, but it’s certainly happened before, and in my lifetime: Kennedy called out the National Guard when Gov. George McGovern of Alabama decided he didn’t want to honor the SCOTUS ruling to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education.
The only difference is that that particular ruling was almost 10 years old by the time McGovern got into office on an election promise of no segregation, so any possible excuses or mitigating factors for his grandstanding on the subject were already long gone, if they ever existed. Kennedy called his bluff, and it was the right call.
I don’t see Biden doing that before completely exhausting every other possible alternative first. But you never know, he might go full Dark Brandon on such a governor. It’s a complete tossup, IMO.