Of Course Presidents Are Officers of the United States
To think otherwise threatens the entire idea of a constitutional republic.
Last week, Donald Trump’s lawyers attempted to convince the Supreme Court that he was a 16th-century European monarch who cannot be disqualified from holding office, because he enjoys immunity from certain constitutional laws. Jonathan Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, began his argument before the Court by declaring, “Trump is not covered by Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment] because the president is not ‘an officer of the United States’ as that term is used throughout the Constitution.”
This effort to avoid the designation “officer of the United States” smacks of a conclusion in want of a rationale. Neither Trump nor his defenders have found a single quotation from the 1860s declaring that the president is not an officer of the United States for purposes of Section 3. Proponents of disqualification, by comparison, have unearthed numerous assertions that Section 3 was meant to encompass all offices and all officeholders. Neither Trump nor his defenders have explained why the Constitution would permit a president who encouraged an attack on Congress to hold all offices in every state and the national government while disqualifying from every office a dogcatcher who was a foot soldier in an insurrection.
Nevertheless, this position has gained a bizarre amount of scholarly support among so-called originalists and textualists, and some justices may now be leaning toward this view. . .
This effort to avoid the designation “officer of the United States” smacks of a conclusion in want of a rationale. Neither Trump nor his defenders have found a single quotation from the 1860s declaring that the president is not an officer of the United States for purposes of Section 3. Proponents of disqualification, by comparison, have unearthed numerous assertions that Section 3 was meant to encompass all offices and all officeholders. Neither Trump nor his defenders have explained why the Constitution would permit a president who encouraged an attack on Congress to hold all offices in every state and the national government while disqualifying from every office a dogcatcher who was a foot soldier in an insurrection.
Nevertheless, this position has gained a bizarre amount of scholarly support among so-called originalists and textualists, and some justices may now be leaning toward this view. . .
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