It is a Sunday and as usual I want to enrich your knowledge as best I can…..yes another FYI post from the Old Professor.
These days there is a massive back and forth about who is eligible to run for office and the defense of whichever side one falls on this debate is always the 14th Amendment….Section 3 to be exact.
For those that do not know the language of this section of the Constitution….I can help….
Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office
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, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
There you have it…..very simple and straightforward.
Since it is an amendment to the US Constitution where did it all begin and why?
As with so many things in this country this amendment had its beginning after the great American Civil War.
On December 4, 1865, the 39th Congress convened in Washington, D.C., marking its first meeting since the Union victory in the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The burning questions facing Congress and President Andrew Johnson—Lincoln’s White House successor—were how to reincorporate the former Confederate states into the Union and how to prevent another violent insurrection.
Among the Senators who tried to take their seats in the coming months was Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederate States of America. Stephens had been arrested for treason in May 1865, imprisoned for five months in Boston, then paroled by President Johnson. Upon returning to his home state of Georgia, the state legislature elected Stephens to the Senate.
He wasn’t alone. Southern legislatures elected to Congress two former Confederate senators, four other former Confederate congressmen and a host of former Confederate military officers. Members of the Radical Republicans, the political group that had led the fight to end slavery and now pushed for the rights of newly freed Black Americans, were outraged. Their plan for post-Civil War governance was Reconstruction, an ambitious legislative program to end slavery, extend the vote to Black men and guarantee equal protection under the laws for all “freedmen,” formerly enslaved people.
But enforcement of Reconstruction would be impossible if state and local governments in the South were run by former Confederates, and if Congress, in the words of Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens, was “filled with yelling secessionists and hissing copperheads.”
The simplest way to legally enshrine loyalty to the U.S. government as a post-war qualification for federal and state political offices was by amending the Constitution. This marked the start of a many-years debate over who should be allowed to serve in government—and who got to decide.
The end result was Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualified anyone from holding federal or state political office who had violated their oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” by engaging “in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-section-three-disqualification-clause-confederates
Now you have enough information (if you actually read the article) to make a formed debated on this subject the next time Uncle Fred brings it up. And probably know more about the subject than the idiot that brings it up on the boob tube.
You may breathe now and resume your day’s activities.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I hope you have a wonderful Sunday and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”