A 9-0 victory including Obama and Biden's appointees?
The gist of CO argument being that the state executive can unilaterally declare an event an insurrection (there has been no finding to date in court) thus blocking a candidate for federal office?
The liberal justices threw this in the trash because they recognize how dangerous this is. After all, imagine if everyone who participated in a BLM riot [1] in 2020 were declared an insurrectionist by red-leaning states and barred from office?
[1] Which were far more destructive and deadly than Jan 6 and did target federal buildings
> The gist of CO argument being that the state executive can unilaterally declare an event an insurrection (there has been no finding to date in court) thus blocking a candidate for federal office?
The state executive didn't act unilaterally to declare it an insurrection. Though even if they had, I don't believe the constitution includes a definition of an insurrection or the process for how it is determined.
> The liberal justices threw this in the trash because they recognize how dangerous this is.
A presumed dangerous outcome should have no bearing on how the amendment is interpreted as written. Doing so moves the decision out of the realm of legal question and makes it political. Further, setting a precedent for "the ends justify the means" seems extremely dangerous itself.
> After all, imagine if everyone who participated in a BLM riot [1] in 2020 were declared an insurrectionist by red-leaning states and barred from office?
That's definitely an interesting question, though one that wasn't part of this case so the court didn't have to decide it. Its worth noting that the intelligibility in 14.3 is specific to those who already took an oath of office. Only those taking part in or supporting the riots and previously took an oath of office would be at risk.
> No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath...
The 14th amendment is specific to people who already to an oath of office. Individuals taking part in, or supporting, the BLM riots wouldn't be impacted unless they had already been sworn into a public office.
Surely there were some individuals that fall under that stipulation, at which point I see nothing written in the amendment or the case law I've seen they clearly states whether or not a state could deem the riots an insurrection and deem those people ineligible.
The supreme court did claim that states don't have this power and that's the core of my issue with their ruling. The amendment clearly states that anyone partaking in insurrection is ineligible for office, and that congress has the ability to enforce that disability. The amendment is written as self-executing and includes no stipulation on who can enforce it or what is considered insurrection with regards to the amendment - the justices invented their own understanding outside of what was actually written.
Edit: one additional note here, the idea of SCOTUS going beyond the scope of the case at hand to set precedent for hypothetical future cases is extremely bad and goes against standards set by many of the sitting justices themselves. Some of the justices covered this in included opinions, but as little as two years ago Roberts specifically claimed that the justices should stop a ruling as soon as they determine the minimum decision required for the case at hand. The majority's inclusion of new precedent for a situation that isn't being litigated is potentially very dangerous and opens the door for the bench to create case law outside the expected processes of either legislation by elected officials or litigation flowing through the full legal process.
You realize that the liberal justices concurred because of the threat of cracked southern/midwestern other states removing presidents besides trump from the ballot if this precedent were established, right? If the liberals had been on the winning side the opinion would have read vastly differently than it did.
The majority decided to answer a question not part of the case, namely that Congress must act to invoke 14.3. That determination means that the entire amendment is not self-executing. They leaned on the 14.5 for this, though a strict reading would be that the amendment is worded as self-executing with no stipulations and 14.5 only offers Congress an avenue to act for a universal answer to, in this case, the question of the eligibility disability.
The ruling justifies this by saying that it seems nun reasonable for states to have the power of deeming a federal candidate ineligible. That meaning is not stipulated at all in the amendment, and goes in the face of both states' authority to run the election process and states' duty to enforce federal law (in this case the ineligibility of a candidate).
The amendment does not stipulate that the power to enforce sits only with Congress, the bench made this up. The amendment does not limit the authority to enforce the amendment only with the federal government, they made this up. Nowhere in the amendment is it written as non self-executing, to the contrary 14.3 specifically provides a way for Congress to undo the intelligibility after the fact.
