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.
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Absolutely, it’s insane that congress passed an ammendment that said a thing and now the Supreme Court is saying “no, it doesn’t say that thing, if you wanted that to apply you’d need to pass a congressional act on a case by case basis.”
Imagine if everytime someone committed tax fraud congress had to officially vote to investigate that specific person. Imagine if a country like America was unable to delegate any powers.
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It’s because they don’t actually care what the constitution or the bill of rights or any of the amendments says. The Tribunal of Six only cares about ensuring their political compatriots - that is, the GOP - can cement their power for good. And if that means that we sink into fascism… they don’t care. Because they’ll be calling the shots.
Literalism is just a tool for the corrupt Supremes to wield as a convenience.
That’s exactly what they want. That’s the goal. The goal is to stop the government from being able to function in any way whatsoever unless specifically delegated by Congress. That’s been the Supreme Court and the Republicans legal modus operandi. That’s why they’re trying to dismantle the entire regulatory system. They want to dismantle every Federal agency. Because when in Congress has to individually do everything and they’ve turned Congress into a corrupt do nothing body, then none of it gets done. They get to do whatever they want with no repercussions and no one to stop them.
SCOTUS is clearly making unconditional rulings. The states should go nuclear and ignore them. Let SCOTUS enforce its decisions.
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This is how you get a civil war
Do you see this mess stabilizing without one? I want Republicans to have access to medical care, an equitable economy, and education, god knows they need it.
They openly prefer people like me were dead. There’s no negotiating with that.
Yes. We aren’t at the civil war stage yet, and to suggest differently may be somewhat unhinged at this phase.
I look at it like this:Two sides. One side is completely full of shit and they know it. They also know the other side knows. However, both sides have agreed to keep up the pretense of everything being okay, for whatever reason. I like to call it the “Slow Break-up”.
It’s like when your romantic partner stops showing up for date nights, then they get home late, then they start sleeping on the couch. And eventually you get around to asking, “Is something wrong?” And they’re all like, “No, everything is fine, work’s just been riding me so hard lately, and now I get home so late that I don’t want to wake you up.” Then one day they’re packing their shit to leave, and they look at you and go, “Look, we both saw this coming.”
It’s always “not happening” until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they could acknowledge they misled you, try to make amends, maybe do something about the problem.
But, my overall point is this. A civil war would be like a fight between spouses. Like, a big serious fight. Where there is the possibility that someone’s going to yell “I want a divorce!”. So the divorce happens, but both parties move on, and try to heal. I am on the side that wants to have the fight, move on, and heal.
Let’s be honest. Either way here could easily end in a civil war. The temperature in the pot has been raising for 40 years. The earlier we lance this boil, the better off we’ll be though. Kicking the can down the road allows extremist ideologies to spread more and more. Which does nothing but guarantee more suffering.
A civil war between what forces? An arm of the US military and a small fragment of the population rilled up enough to attempt human wave tactics?
It might lead to a ton of scholastic violence, maybe riots and some attempts on public figures from random idiots…
But let’s assume people go charging out armed into the streets and get organized
But there’s something important to think about. We have a “just in time” food distribution system. Grocery stores would be empty in a couple weeks if food deliveries are stopped, say by blockading roads. The US government and military keeps ungodly amounts of food supplies stashed around strategically too…
The only way it could happen is if part of the military attempted a coup. That requires a split at the top. Plenty of grunts might defect, but grunts aren’t going to do a lot. You need to take entire military bases to keep aircraft running and to get that nice information asymmetry.
We’re living fragile, interconnected lives at the end of the Anthropocene.
We can’t have a civil war. We’re incapable of it.
We could have a little chaos for a few days, it might even be a wakeup call
Careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
Illegitimate courts create legitimate protest actions.
I agree, but that is vastly different from States just unilaterally disregarding legal precedent. If we get to that point we are way beyond mere protest.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
—JFK
Republicans are working overtime to make that happen.
THIS^
It’s like the Supreme Court thinks it can supersede the constitution because it thinks the ammendment was poorly worded/thought out. cough cough second ammendment cough cough
It’s been a shit show since day one with this court. If there’s ever been a time to pack the court it is now. Hell, do it in response to this ruling. Allowing an insurrectionist on the ballot is plain unacceptable. We’re already heading toward discourse we cannot solve. Make a stand, would someone?
Edit: Just clarifying it’s the Supreme Court who doesn’t think it has to adhere to the language in the amendment. Not myself.
The thing is it’s not poorly worded. It clearly establishes the ban and clearly allows Congress to create legislation. It does not revoke the state power to administer elections. It does not require Congress to create legislation.
It’s meant to be understood by anyone reading it and it was created with far more modern English than the original document. What you see is what you get, no semantics required.
It’s the Supreme Court that thinks it, not me. I’ll update my text to reflect that.
I thought I read that the decision was unanimous. If the liberals and conservatives on the court agree, it seems unlikely that packing the court would change the decision.
Also, as much as I’d love to see Trump excluded from ballots, we all know that states like Texas would turn around and do the same to Biden, just out of spite. It would change the nature of democracy, in a bad way, if individual states could just randomly decide to exclude candidates they don’t like. Heck, what would stop them from excluding ALL candidates of a particular party, except perhaps some token losers or quislings no one ever heard of?
The liberals dessented by essentially saying the law should be “self executing” (a fucking joke) in that if he was part of an insurrection then he’s just as ineligible as a 30 year old running for president. You simply can’t run if you’re under 35, so in some fantasy reality those judges live in Trump just wouldn’t be able to be on the ballots automatically, as if no one has to actually ENFORCE that law (see: judges actions in removing him)
It’s astounding how utterly deranged our laws are.
Trump has well earned the name “Teflon Don.”
The ONLY thing that man has not lied about is “I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any supporters (and he’d walk away into the sunset with 0 repercussions whatsoever)”
This is a strange situation, for sure. The age requirement you bring up is a good comparison. Age is something you are, not something you’ve done, possibly done, or definitey not done, so there isn’t as much to argue about.
However, what if some 33 year-old decided to run and had the support of one of the two big parties, and just lied about her age? Presumably, that would require a finding of fact and would be adjudicated by the federal courts, not Congress or each state legislature or Attorney General.
Your example makes it pretty clear that even something supposedly “self-executing” still needs a back-up plan. Another interesting example is the 2000 election, where it was the Supreme Court that arbitrated the final vote, which decided the winner of the presidential election (incorrectly, it seems, based on later statistical analysis). Nasedon these two examples, I don’t entirely understand their reasoning for pushing the decision about eligibility to Congress. While an election is for a political office, the process of running an election is supposed to be apolitical.
What the US really needs is a non-partisan, apolitical, independent federal electoral commission.
The liberals dessented
They most certainly did not. The liberal justices wrote concurring opinions. They very explicitly did not write dissenting opinions.
There is a remedy for that actually. If a state gets too far out of line with it’s elections Congress can refuse to certify results from that state. This is what Trump supporters were hoping Congress would do in 2020 and why they rioted when it didn’t happen.
And if we can’t bar proven bad faith actors from office then our democracy is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet, like a person who overdosed on Tylenol. Furthermore the longer we push this confrontation with anti-democracy forces back the bloodier the resolution gets. We’ve seen this handled well and handled poorly in history. Handled well are cases like Bismarck and handled poorly are cases like the French Revolution. (Which if you think was just rich people dying, you really need to actually read about it.)
Right, but Congress votes along party lines so that isn’t much of a remedy. The remedy is just as flawed as the process that leads to political bad acting in the first place. That’s why people look to a (supposedly) non-partisan body like SCOTUS to resolve the issue, and why SCOTUS becoming partisan is such a big deal.
But your larger point that the system has broken down is well-taken. Much of how government functions successfully is based on unspoken conventions and norms of behavior. When a large proportion of the population actually WANTS someone like Trump, you have a very serious problem. No democratic structure or form of government can save the people from themselves forever. Sure, gerrymandering and other dirty tricks make a difference, but at the end of the day Trump really will get almost half the vote. He’s not the representative of some small fringe party who managed to ride a crazy set of circumstances to power, like Hitler did. Trump represents one of only two major parties and will legitimately get support from right around half of those who vote, which is just crazy when you think about it.
What the actual fuck happened that we stand on the precipice of such madness?
We repealed the fairness doctrine; didn’t obliterate Fox News when it was obvious they were party propaganda fraudulently representing themselves; gave social media a license to be neither publisher nor public utility under regulations; and made bribery legal in Citizens United.
Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.
As far as section 230 goes, that is by far the least problematic, and take note how the vast majority of efforts to remove it come from conservatives who appear to me to be annoyed that their views are being called out as harmful or hateful.
It seems that way but they couldn’t use algorithms the way they do without section 230 to shield them.
And yeah I didn’t realize it was the mobile link. I’ll keep an eye out for that in the future.
Yeah, content algorithms aren’t great, but revoking section 230 isn’t the way to solve that.
Can I just watch les mis? Does singing wolverine miss anything important?
Lol. Just a few things. Some mass murder, partisan politics, and a system that failed so thoroughly they went back to having a monarch after trying to murder all of the monarchists.
If the Supreme Court became a race to the bottom I seriously do not care. 150 justices represents 500 million better than 9 ever could. Cripple the courts, they’re only famous for dealing out racism for the past 300 years.
I see that the decision is unanimous and that goes back to my original point. The court is showing they can supersede the constitution in this case so why not others where the constitution is failing? I don’t pretend to know high level con law, I really don’t. I do know stories about how some of the first justices struggled to pass down rulings that would effect so many with only their limited view. Not our current justices, though. If I remember correctly the constitution says very little about the scope of the Supreme Court other than its the highest court. It wasn’t even till years after the founders had came and went that it started getting into this interpretating the constitution shit.
Yeah, the Supreme Court’s record on key issues is not great. Citizens United, for example, is at the root of a lot of the current troubles.
But a big part of the problem is actually the structure of US democracy itself. US democracy was set up primarily to prevent tyranny, and it does that through separation of powers. And it has been successful in that regard. However, the structure the founders created also causes gridlock on key issues.
In the US, it is relatively rare for one party to be fully in charge for any length of time. In a Westminster-style parliamentary system, on the other hand, a majority government usually gets a chance to implement their program and then they deal with the consequences in the next election. The role of the opposition is to point out all the stupid things the government does. When something goes poorly, it is clear who is to blame.
One of the problems with the US system is that the parties can legitimately blame each other when nothing gets done, which means they can avoid accountability.
In parliamentary systems, the government of the day bears the blame for fuck ups, whereas in the US system there is a tendency to blame the institutions. Perhaps that’s why you see surveys in the US where people strongly approve of their local representative, but have very low approval of Congress overall. This lack of power and accountability for the government is also why the Supreme Court is such a huge force in the US. Gridlock doesn’t change the fact that decisions need to be made, so more and more key decisions are being made either by the Supreme Court or by presidential decree.
Also, having a President is just a bad idea. I believe the US only has a President because Washington was so revered at the time. Having such a singular, king-like office with actual power inevitably creates a cult of personality. In contrast, parliamentary systems turn the king or his representative into a powerless ceremonial position that stays silent on political issues.
It’s like the Supreme Court thinks it can supersede the constitution because it thinks the amendment was poorly worded
That, or they had an outcome they wanted and found a way to get it
Where are all the states’ rights people now?
Too busy working to overthrow the government and implement a fascist dictatorship…
You know, in a sane universe, the President could legitimately actually declare a national emergency over the ongoing efforts to overturn representative democracy in the open, but we live in this one.
If we lived in a sane universe, the foreign-funded propaganda that Trump and his grift relies upon for energy, cash, and followers would have been turned off fifteen years ago back when Fox “News” openly misrepresented material facts regarding the Obama administration, or when they got sued the first time for not being actual news.
The much vaunted checks and balances mean nothing when the SC is corrupt
This was a unanimous decision
It wasn’t. 5 said the text means the opposite of what it says. Four said enforcing it is up to the federal courts, not state courts. Two wildly different opinions with the only thing in common being overturning the state ruling.
5 said the text means the opposite of what it says. Four said enforcing it is up to the federal courts, not state courts.
Both said that that one state couldn’t decide it. The majority did take a more radical stance, but to say this is the SC court being corrupt when democrat appointees also wrote concurring opinions in regards to the actual ruling was the claim I was criticizing
I’m sorry, but is your uniting factor between the two stances “they both said one state couldn’t decide” here? Isn’t “one vote does note supersede a greater number of the opposite” a feature of democracy? Shouldn’t this have been the motherfucking default stance of the United States supreme court regardless of their stance on any other part of the issue?
Quick edit to explain my point: I don’t think saying “one state can’t decide” was the actual issue here, and SCOTUS choosing not to address it the larger one.
I don’t think saying “one state can’t decide” was the actual issue here, and SCOTUS choosing not to address it the larger one.
I mean, that was the issue in the supreme court case, from all of the SCOTUS opinions, a big part of what the SCOTUS has to do is set precedent for centuries.
So it’s unanimous corruption, then.
Who bribed them?
I don’t know, look at who Clarence Thomas has been vacationing with for clues.
What about the rest of the justices?
Defund the Supreme Court.
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It’s not inconsistent with the court’s inconsistency though.
Scalia was a legal juggernaut on the bench and off it, as unfortunate his politics may be, he had a very large influence on the legal arena surrounding Constitutional law. He argued (correctly) for separated powers and the legislature doing the legislation on big and controversial topics instead of the court(s) - openly pointing out SCotUS’s composition as an unelected, politically appointed technocracy.
What changed and grew was the inconsistency of the conservative members at respecting that separation of powers whilst also not shying from their role as final legal arbiter. Trump v Anderson was correctly decided that states cannot deny candidates federal ballot access without due process, but they completely neglected to affirm or deny the lower courts ruling of what counts as attempted insurrection, kicking that to Congress.
This is political cowardice, not good and proper separated powers keeping each other in check. A legal case is the correct route to determine facts surrounding a candidates eligibility - not a political disqualification process without precedent nor established rules regarding evidentiary eligibility, rights of the accused, composition of the adjudicators, etc. any attempt to disqualify via US Congress will spurn a host of new legal challenges based on procedural questions
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This is political cowardice, not good and proper separated powers keeping each other in check.
That is democracy, they have to rule based on the law, and they err on the side of innocence. I think a court that prefers for the elected people to make policy decisions instead of them is better than a court that sets its own policy.
I have to disagree. Under the Marbury v. Madison precedent and the centuries of case law supporting it, the legislature writes the laws while the courts interpret any ambiguity (because lawyers and judges abhor ambiguity) and apply the law as interpreted.
A Federal circuit court had to decide if a newly threatened species of toad does, or does not get the protections given “endangered” as specified in the primary legislation… the highest court in the land is capable of answering what insurrection is, and if it was committed.
That is a pretty clearly different form of ambiguity, the ambiguity here is that the 14th amendment does not state how to enforce the law, and does not delegate that enforcement to the states.
Such power over governance, however, does not extend to federal officeholders and candidates. Because federal officers “ ‘owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people,’ ” powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically “dele- gated to, rather than reserved by, the States.” U. S. Term 7Cite as: 601 U. S. ____ (2024) Per Curiam Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U. S. 779, 803–804 (1995) (quoting 1 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States §627, p. 435 (3d ed. 1858)). But nothing in the Constitution delegates to the States any power to en- force Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates. As an initial matter, not even the respondents contend that the Constitution authorizes States to somehow remove sitting federal officeholders who may be violating Section 3. Such a power would flout the principle that “the Constitu- tion guarantees ‘the entire independence of the General Government from any control by the respective States.’ ” Trump v. Vance, 591 U. S. 786, 800 (2020) (quoting Farmers and Mechanics Sav. Bank of Minneapolis v. Minnesota, 232 U. S. 516, 521 (1914)). Indeed, consistent with that princi- ple, States lack even the lesser powers to issue writs of mandamus against federal officials or to grant habeas cor- pus relief to persons in federal custody.
- quoting the majority ruling
But they do agree, that Section 3 provides no other method for enforcement, that is the ambiguity. But the ambiguity is easily resolved by section 5 of the 14th amendment:
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
- section 5 of the 14th Amendment
Although only an individual State’s action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so. The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amend- ment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other po- tential means of federal enforcement.
This is the minority then saying that’s not clear enough, because while section 3 prescribes no means of enforcement and then section 5 explicitly says congress has the power to enforce it- they say it is ambiguous because it doesn’t say only congress has the power to enforce it explicitly. I personally prefer to agree with the majority and say since it doesn’t give random people the right to depose the president- then they probably don’t have the right unless new legislation by Congress who does explicitly have the power says they do.
But that’s my point exactly about the law as written leaving open ambiguity. The courts have generally either affirmed the law as written/upheld in case law, struck down parts or entire portions of the law, or bounced lesser issues back to the lower courts.
There already is a political process for individual, case by case disqualification - impeachment. Congress has already adopted a law regarding disqualification for insurrection, and the courts did not strike down that law in part or whole, despite gutting the enforcement mechanism.
It’s also not a small group of people deciding to capriciously allow or disqualify people the chance at office. Congress determined that insurrection is a disqualifying offense, as is being too young, or not a citizen. We don’t kick disqualifications for those categories back to Congress for a ‘trial’ but this is being treated differently, because the court is shirking from its traditionally assumed role
Congress wrote laws specifying the process specifically of getting on the ballot, those laws preclude age and require citizenship, but I don’t think specify the process for removing an insurrectionist. And I think that because if they did someone would have opened a federal suit of the election commission by now.
There is no side of innocence in determining eligibility for office. The requirements laid out in the main body of the Constitution already make it clear that holding the office of President is not an inalienable right.
The Constitution does however err on limiting impedances to popular democracy, especially post-Civil War
Pack the court.
This was a unanimous decision, the democrat appointees on the court agreed.
Or unpack it of neoliberalism.
Cool can we ignore the second amendment next?
God, I hate this timeline. Why couldn’t we get the cool dystopian one.
Don’t worry, let this one cook for a while and it’ll turn into the cool dystopian one.
As if. The would be technocratic losers will never create synths, much less let us have sick katana arms.
I was really hoping for zombies, instead we get fascism and climate apocalypse.
No mention of the Court’s reasoning that it should not be enforced at the State level, but instead at the Federal level?
The federal government does not hold elections. States do.
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No mention of the Court’s reasoning that it should not be enforced at the State level, but instead at the Federal level?
See paragraphs 7, 10, and 12 of the article, which discuss factors already decided at the state level and how this ruling impacts the status quo.
I was speaking of the summary. A balanced summary is an intellectually honest summary.
Also, only paragraph 12 (kind of) covers what I asked about (Court’s reasoning of Fed vs State enforcement; see above) …
It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals. Establishing a uniform process is better than living with a patchwork of state proceedings.
For reference sake, here are the three paragraphs you mentioned …
From the article, paragraph 7 …
But now Section 3 is different from other sections of the amendment. It requires federal legislation to enforce its terms, at least as applied to candidates for federal office. Through inaction alone, Congress can effectively erase part of the 14th Amendment.
From the article, paragraph 10 …
As Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson point out, this approach is also inconsistent with the constitutional approach to other qualifications for the presidency. We can bar individuals from holding office who are under the age limit or who don’t meet the relevant citizenship requirement without congressional enforcement legislation. We can enforce the two-term presidential term limit without congressional enforcement legislation. Section 3 now stands apart not only from the rest of the 14th Amendment, but also from the other constitutional requirements for the presidency.
From the article, paragraph 12 …
It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals. Establishing a uniform process is better than living with a patchwork of state proceedings. But the fact that Congress has not acted should not effectively erase the words from the constitutional page. Chaotic enforcement of the Constitution may be suboptimal. But it’s far better than not enforcing the Constitution at all.
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was speaking of the summary.No, you were speaking of
No, I was speaking of the summary.
You’re misrepresenting what I said, even after I told you explicitly what I was saying. You are not being intellectually honest.
I propose we go out in mass this weekend and let them know we are pissed.
What’s next? No more basic human rights? Maybe make it ok to own slaves if the owner really really wants to?
Let’s say, I’m at a bus stop and I see this other guy next to me… really big guy who looks like a gym manager…and I tell him to be my slave? What then?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.
In the aftermath of the oral argument last month, legal observers knew with near-certainty that the Supreme Court was unlikely to apply Section 3 to Trump.
But instead of any of these options, the court went with arguably the broadest reasoning available: that Section 3 isn’t self-executing, and thus has no force or effect in the absence of congressional action.
We can bar individuals from holding office who are under the age limit or who don’t meet the relevant citizenship requirement without congressional enforcement legislation.
In one important respect, the court’s ruling on Monday is worse and more consequential than the Senate’s decision to acquit Trump after his Jan. 6 impeachment trial in 2021.
It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals.
The original article contains 948 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It was a unanimous decision and the precedent they set was that states don’t have the right to declare who is and who is not a traitor, only the federal government can decide that. I don’t like Trump, but the precedent needed to be set and I agree with the supreme court on this one. You can still try to prove he is a traitor in federal court, and then he would be knocked off the ballot in all states.
Honestly, that part of the amendment is just horribly written. It reads like a rush job, which is probably was given it was written to remove/keep out former Confederates. There’s no mechanism in there to determine guilt or any definition of what constitutes insurrection or rebellion. Seceding, forming a new government, and declaring war on the US is obvious, but it doesn’t say what the minimum threshold actually is. The entire thing is just two sentences. This very comment has a similar word count.
It was written that way to welcome back the confederates. This was a war where it was brother against brother, father against son, so it was written in a way to welcome back the south. Like “yeah, we kicked your ass, but we’re still friends, we’re only going to change things a little bit”, and it has to be a super majority so anything less than 2/3’s in both houses isn’t enough. A super majority like that can impeach AND remove a sitting president. It could also recall a Continental Congress which has powers not used since the revolutionary war.
I don’t think that was the majority opinion, but the concurring opinion. The majority was party lines and stated that no, federal Court is also not enough, only action by congress will count.
Yeah, if you get a super majority from both houses of Congress then it supercedes the president and the supreme court, but that does not happen very often.
