Subject: Re: Help Wanted: Constitutional Grammarian
Another example of why we need not only a grammarian but a historian analyzing new laws for accidental conflicts with such established, subtle, obscure concepts. The average American hears of people running for "elected office" every day. We have ELECTED officials, including the President, take an "oauth of office" at the beginning of each term "in office." The average American would be irate after discovering a law passed in the last forty years regulating the conduct of "officials" or "office holders" would not apply to an elected role and watching an elected official walk from charges.

The law needs to be a very precise practice and we can't afford to spend the time rewriting every law to update it as language and its use evolves over decades and centuries. However, I don't think you could find a single American with more than two brian cells and a 3-digit IQ who would have read the 14th amendment and not come to a first conclusion that its INTENT was to keep actors who violated a prior "promise" to PROTECT the Constitution as part of ANY official government "role" (elected or appointed) from holding "any" such "roles" in the future if found to have violated that "promise" by actively subverting the Constitution in any way. I doubt there is anything in the historical record that can prove drafters of the 14th amendment and those that voted for it meant to preserve a path for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, et al to run for President of the United States and be allowed to take office because the people voted for them.

Between the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, their crappy wording and sentence structure may have slipped loose enough violence and legal mayhem within the country to count as the seeds of the country's undoing.

The country has devolved to the point where "Up Goer Five" level simplicitly isn't required for us non-legal rubes, it's required to ensure highly sophisticated types bent on subverting the country cannot find logical / grammatical loopholes in prior law and exploit them to go scot free after committing crimes. It does us no good for judges to insist on being "technically" correct in applying 150 year old interpretations of grammar and terminology when justice in present circumstances requires a different interpretation.

Frankly, the country may have jumped the shark. It was bad enough we had to amend the Constitution in an ATTEMPT to keep those who actively fought to END the government from seeking new "appointed office" or "elected positions" in the surviving government. The fact that we now find we should have EXPLICITLY clarified the restriction needed to apply to EVERY possible position in the government including the President because 35% of the country is hell-bent on electing a 91-count, criminally indicted, national security danger back to President in the end is the only thing that matters. We cannot amend our way away from that existential stupidity.


WTH