‘The Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution — not to ‘support’ the Constitution,’ read a filing from the former president’s attorneys
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
To be fair, “support” isn’t the exact word used, but “preserve, protect, and defend” is pretty unequivocal
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The problem is that the current Supreme Court clearly would support throwing that out, and they LOVE semantics like that to justify clearly bullshit decisions.
If interpreting laws is going to just turn into how much money a wealthy individual (or anyone wealthy enough to foot the bill) can argue the semantics of anything … what good and what use is any law?
We are long past the point where power and wealth buys better legal outcomes as evidenced by how few rich and powerful people over the last half century have spent any time in prison for their crimes compared to people with neither wealth nor power.
Imprisoning poor people.
They also like using history to support their decisions. If it can be shown that the presidential oath is intended to go beyond “support” I would see the court being persuaded that “support” is implied by “protect, preserve, and defend”. It depends on whether the textualists or the pseudo-historians win the day.
The five conservative “justices” are conservatives first and “justices” second. They will always rule however the standard, bigoted, Fox-News-loving white nationalist will rule. They do this by using wordplay and bad-faith semantics.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either deception or manipulation. Every word.
Exactly. It’s a massive stretch to think there’s a false equivalency between “support” and “preserve, protect, and defend”.
But of course…this is Trump here. He’s willing to bend himself into a pretzel if it means he can avoid responsibility for anything bad.
You can preserve, protect, and defend something you don’t support. Debate 101 at even a high school level is learning how to argue the side of an argument that you don’t support.
So while in office, he preserved/protected/defended something he didn’t support. He then lead some form of rebellion against it, causing him to be in violation of the spirit of the 14th but not the letter as it’s written, so he should still be qualified to serve.
The Supreme Court would love this wordplay, except, if they actually accept it, they’re not just invalidating the spirit of the 14th, but undermining it completely as it would never ever ever be relevant to anyone, ever again. And wouldn’t that also be against their oaths to uphold the constitution?
So most likely Trump will be eligible for re-election because I have no doubt that if they can get away with the Citizens United ruling, they can and will do whatever the hell they want.
Did he really preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution on January 6th though? (Spoiler alert: he didn’t). Perhaps that is the better question here than this semantics argument.
I think you can make an argument that if you preserve and protect something, you’re supporting it.
But the real issue, to me, is that no one takes an oath specifically to “support” the constitution. If the presidential oath isn’t an example of supporting it, then Article Ii makes no sense at all - why would it even be there?
Yeah I think the difference here is outcomes vs intentions (consequentialism vs virtue theory, if you want to be exact about ethics). Trump could support the constitution through his actions, but communicate his intentions otherwise: and vice versa.
I’m sure the righter part of the SC will find a reason :|
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that is the exact kind of loophole that gives conservative judges the cover they need to be terrible human beings.
“The best of his ability” is the loophole he should have exploited.
It’s a lot more believable.
That’d be my defense!
Like, I can understand thinking my ability exceeds my performance, but I think that might just be a simple overestimation of my ability
I’ve taken a couple oaths to the US government…
I dont remember any of them saying “support the constitution”
So by their logic, this effects no one.
Maybe he’ll argue that it just means the physical written constitution itself.
“The constitution is a piece of paper in a box, okay? I defended it”