As the Colorado Supreme Court wrote, January 6 meets the bar for insurrection “under any viable definition” of the term. The legal scholar Mark Graber, who has closely studied the Fourteenth Amendment’s history, argues that “insurrection” should be understood broadly—an act of organized resistance to government authority motivated by a “public purpose.” That certainly describes the Capitol riot, in which a violent mob attacked law enforcement and threatened members of Congress and the vice president in order to block the rightful counting of the electoral vote and illegally secure the victory of the losing candidate. The historical record also suggests that the amendment’s requirement that a prospective officeholder must have “engaged in insurrection” should also be understood broadly—meaning that Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that morning and his encouragement of the rioters while they smashed their way through the Capitol more than fit the bill.
This is clearly not the case. Donald Trump himself has disputed the natural born citizenship of Barack Obama, and he has done it for almost a decade. You are making an assumption, and taking for granted that someone’s natural born citizenship or age is plainly obvious. The rule of law is only as valid as the system of jurisprudence that backs it up, and only remains broadly applicable as long as it is backed by the consent of the governed.
Therefore, the delegitimization of the judicial system and erosion of the law through slippery interpretations of the constitution that are in no way ambiguous either in language or spirit is the HALLMARK of conservative legal strategy. Conservatism is based on the fundamental principal that there are groups that the law protects but does not bind, and binds but does not protect. You are feeding into this dangerous ideology by suggesting these legal definitions are ambiguous, or that we do not have contemporaneous interpretation from the people who wrote & debated them.
I don’t hate you for it, but I don’t respect it either. You may not like my assertion that you are legally & historically illiterate. I can understand that, and I don’t blame you for that either. Sometimes the truth hurts, but that doesn’t mean you should insulate yourself from it. The honest, mature thing to do is to approach criticism from an objective, dispassionate position.
My criticism is that you are not willing to follow your arguments to their logical conclusions, and are engaging in reinforcing the dangerous practice of smuggling in ambiguity via “whataboutism” arguments that really only serve to strengthen the psychopathic modern crypto-fascist movement that is being lead by ivy league educated authoritarians who are abusing the cognitive dissonance of the uneducated working class that falls victim to their social control mechanisms.