Excerpt:
It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment]. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”
In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.
This is a fairly easy read for the legal layperson, and the best general overview I’ve seen yet that sets forth the various legal and constitutional factors involved in today’s decision, including the concurring dissent by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson.
But that’s my point exactly about the law as written leaving open ambiguity. The courts have generally either affirmed the law as written/upheld in case law, struck down parts or entire portions of the law, or bounced lesser issues back to the lower courts.
There already is a political process for individual, case by case disqualification - impeachment. Congress has already adopted a law regarding disqualification for insurrection, and the courts did not strike down that law in part or whole, despite gutting the enforcement mechanism.
It’s also not a small group of people deciding to capriciously allow or disqualify people the chance at office. Congress determined that insurrection is a disqualifying offense, as is being too young, or not a citizen. We don’t kick disqualifications for those categories back to Congress for a ‘trial’ but this is being treated differently, because the court is shirking from its traditionally assumed role
Congress wrote laws specifying the process specifically of getting on the ballot, those laws preclude age and require citizenship, but I don’t think specify the process for removing an insurrectionist. And I think that because if they did someone would have opened a federal suit of the election commission by now.