Tag: Fourteenth Amendment
The Supreme Court’s Supreme Betrayal
The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.
In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the
The Supreme Court’s Colorado Opinion Is About Fear, Not Law
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
You can’t always get what you want. What Mick Jagger said about life applies with equal, perhaps even greater, force to litigation. Like life, litigation has its ups and downs. It reflects human fears and frailties—because judges, lawyers, and litigants are human. Law is never perfect, and never will be.
And so it is with the United States
What the Colorado Oral Argument Missed
Often the outcome of a Supreme Court case is hard to predict from its oral argument. Not yesterday’s.
The justices’ questions in Trump v. Anderson made clear that the Court will rule—perhaps even unanimously—that no state can decide to disqualify Donald Trump from serving as president unless and until Congress enacts a statute granting that permission. Because Congress hasn’t done so, the Court, in all likelihood, will order Colorado and every other state to let Trump continue his reelection campaign.
The Unwitting Trump Enablers – The Atlantic
The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.
This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A. Graham anticipated that the events of January 6 would be “memory-holed,” and
Trump Is Constitutionally Prohibited From the Presidency
As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.
This protection,
What Was Clarence Thomas Thinking?
Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.
In order to argue that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to authorize racially specific efforts to alleviate inequality, Thomas finds himself forced to explain the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was reauthorized in 1866 by the same Congress that approved the Fourteenth
Dobbs Is No Brown v. Board of Education
Homer Plessy is being recognized more and more. In 1896, the light-skinned, French-speaking Louisianan gen de coleur was memorialized in what is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow segregation laws. The decision is second in infamy only to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that Black men had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
As one of the worst Supreme Court
‘There’s So Much That’s Not in the Constitution’
During oral argument at the Supreme Court in December over Mississippi’s abortion ban, Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid bare a fundamental truth: “There’s so much that’s not in the Constitution.”
Her point is a deep one, and salient to the abortion debate: The text of the Constitution does not explicitly affirm the right to abortion; no one disagrees with that. But the Constitution protects far more than what it literally describes. Unwritten ideas necessarily guide even the strictest readings of the