In a great historical irony, one of the least studied parts of the U.S. Constitution is poised to unleash on the country a whirlwind of political vendetta.
The Supreme Court, however, may still block such a consequence.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the disqualification clause, was originally designed to punish rebels of the Civil War and generally overlooked as irrelevant since. In recent years, however, it was dusted off by some scholars and wielded by Democrat activists and officials who say it bars former President Donald Trump from returning to office due to his role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Colorado Supreme Court already concluded that President Trump engaged in insurrection and is thus disqualified under Section 3.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows made a similar finding. Similar efforts are underway in other states, including New York, California, and Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the matter on a speedy schedule, setting a hearing for Feb. 8.
The text of Section 3 is sweeping and open-ended, and needs to be interpreted with caution, multiple constitutional experts said. The Epoch Times reviewed thousands of pages of legal, academic, and historical texts on the matter.
Perilously, historical record suggests the clause was written with virtually no foresight of how it may be applied outside the Civil War context—an “unexploded bomb” left dormant in the Constitution, as one expert put it.
Republicans, the original authors of the law, face being ousted with their own petard, though on a fuse more than 150 years long.
The repercussions may ripple back, however, as some already pursue the thought that, as applied to President Trump, Section 3 may well apply to many a Democrat, including President Joe Biden himself.
Tumultuous Times
The 14th Amendment arose from the political consequences of the just-concluded Civil War. The 39th Congress, majority-Republican, assembled in 1865 at extraordinarily fraught times.
“They were meeting just months after the end of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated just a few months earlier,” said Kurt Lash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond and leading authority on the history of the 14th Amendment.
Immediately, the Republicans faced a political crisis, he told The Epoch Times
For one thing, freeing millions of slaves had unintended consequences.
During the founding, northern states sought to diminish what they saw as the south’s unfair political advantage—the slave population would be counted in census for apportionment in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, but wouldn’t be allowed to vote, boosting the voting power of free southerners.
That’s why the north insisted that slaves shouldn’t count, while the south wanted them counted. A compromise was eventually reached to count slaves as three-fifths of a person.
Once freed, former slaves would be counted as whole persons again which would “amplify the political power of the slave-owning states once they returned to Congress,” Mr. Lash said.
After the war, southern Democrats immediately instituted the “Black Codes,” which de facto blocked black Americans’ rights, including the right to vote, and forestalled a Republican bloc forming in the south.
Southern and northern Democrats were on the cusp of teaming up to claim majority in Congress, upending the Republican “Reconstruction” program, Mr. Lash said.
“This was an immediate danger to the Republicans and to the Union.”
Republicans were ready to employ radical measures to prevent such a hazard. When southern Democrats returned to Congress at the onset of the 39th Congress in December 1865, the Republican majority in the House simply refused to read their names and seat them.
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