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The dumbest part of Trump’s Supreme Court ballot brief
It’s hard to pick just one, but consider Trump’s claim that since he never swore to “support” the Constitution, he can be president again even if he’s an insurrectionist.
Donald Trump’s new Supreme Court brief throws a bunch of arguments at the wall in the hopes one of them will stick and he can become president again. One of his claims stands out as especially silly — that he never swore to “support” the Constitution and so, his argument goes, he’s not subject to the provision disqualifying people who violate their sworn support.
His lawyers make that argument because Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to insurrectionist officeholders who previously swore to “support the Constitution of the United States.” Since presidents swear to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, Trump argues in his brief, this section doesn’t apply to him.
You don’t have to be a lawyer to see the absurdity of the claim. In rejecting it, the Colorado Supreme Court explained that the inaugural oath is consistent with the “plain meaning of the word ‘support.’” The state justices noted that modern dictionaries and ones at the time of Section 3’s drafting both define “support” to include “defend” and vice versa.
“The specific language of the presidential oath does not make it anything other than an oath to support the Constitution,” they wrote, adding: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section Three disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section Three.”
Absolutely classic Republican double-talk bullshit. This is the exact sort of flaming Republican asininity that the two MAGA Hat Trump supporters and defenders in here are constantly trying to bullshit into reality. The classic way they have of declaring that words have meanings that they don't and that they don't mean what they obviously do. They never really got on board with this whole "English language" thing. They just want words to mean whatever they want them to mean or visa versa. Classic. Simply classic.
