Plainclothes Officer
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A judge in my neighborhood has ruled that a man who can’t stop lying about his weight (and almost anything else you can think of) did indeed incite, and engage in, an insurrection against the United States while he was its president, and ought to be given a chance to do it again.
Though the ruling is being appealed, it means I get yet another chance to vote against Donald Trump, so I’m pretty happy about that.
It’s a mite peculiar, though, that she hung her judge’s robe on a determination that the orange blob was never an officer of the United States, and so under the Fourteenth Amendment isn’t qualified to be disqualified from holding office again. Perhaps she meant, never was qualified to hold office in the first place.
The Supreme Court said, in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982): “Article II, § 1, of the Constitution provides that ‘[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States. . . .’ This grant of authority establishes the President as the chief constitutional officer of the Executive Branch.”
Also, in February 2020, The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in K&D LLC v. Trump Old Post Office, LLC, 951 F. 3d 503, concluded, at President Trump’s request, that the U.S. President is a federal officer, when they wrote: “President Trump removed the suit to federal court under the federal officer removal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1).” The former big guy doesn’t remember that, of course.
“Commander-in-Chief” sure sounds like some kind of officer.
The legal dictionary I use says a federal officer is anyone elected or appointed to an office in the federal government. I’m pretty sure they mean the government of the United States.
30 November 2023 @ 3:44 pm
What’s your take on the judge’s reliance on different oaths?
1 December 2023 @ 11:44 am
My take is that the judge is a human being who doesn’t want to be blown up in her bed for being the first person in the country to take its favorite fascist candidate off the ballot.
A president of the United States swears, to the best ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Other oaths of lesser office to which the judge referred (including her own) apparently only bind the swearer to support it, which is the word used in Section 3 of Amendment XIV.
I suppose “preserve” and “protect” could mean laminating the thing and sticking it in your big fat wallet. “Defend” could mean throwing yourself in front of a bus about to carve a tire track into a copy. But all those words are synonyms for the word the judge swore: to “support” the Constitution.
Only a man as ignorant of the plain meaning of words as Donald Trump is would say, “Sure, I swore to preserve, protect, and defend the old rag, but I never said I’d support it.”
Same as when he was preserving, protecting, and defending U.S. secrets he kept in his bathroom: he swore he kept the door closed, but he never said he shut it.
5 December 2023 @ 2:42 pm
I’d like to think the judge wasn’t intimidated but even she realized that the interpretation she was giving to the plain text of the amendment led to nonsensical results.