Is the President an Amendment XIV, Section 3 “Officer of the United States”? Answer: What People Said Before Trump

 

 

George Washington Paschal, The Constitution of the United States Defined and Carefully Annotated (W.H. & O.H. Morrison, Law Booksellers 1868). Id. at xxxviii (opining that the Article VI oath and Section 3 apply to “precisely the same class of officers” (emphases added)); id. at 250 n.242 (Section 3 is “based upon the higher obligation to obey th[e] [Article VI] oath”); id. at 494 (noting that the “persons included in this [Section 3] disability are the same who had taken an official oath under clause 3 of Article VI” (emphasis added)); 

Garrett Epps, Reading the U.S. Constitution 177–78 (2013) (“And political power, beyond the mere act of voting, would be withheld from that group of people who had sworn an individual oath before secession to support the Constitution and had then violated that oath by joining the Confederacy. There were three classes of such people: (1) former members of the United States Congress; (2) appointed federal officials and US military officers (both were ‘officer[s] of the United States’); and (3) state officials, whether judges, legislators, or executive officials, who had taken the oath prescribed for all state officials in Article VI, Section Two, to regard the Constitution as ‘the supreme law of the land.’ If anyone meeting this description had joined the Confederate cause by ‘engag[ing] in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or giv[ing] aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,’ he was barred from certain political offices. These forbidden offices are, in order, (1) member of Congress; (2) presidential elector; (3) officer of the United States, meaning an appointed official either in the military or in the civil government; and (4) state officer of any kind.” (emphases added));

Christopher R. Green, Our Bipartisan Due Process Clause, 26 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 1202 (2019) (noting that “section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is limited to those rebels who broke Article VI oaths” (emphasis added)); 

Seth adds: Presidents take Article II oaths, not Article VI oaths. And Presidents are elected, not appointed. 

Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘Is the President an Amendment XIV, Section 3 “Officer of the United States”? Answer: What People Said Before Trump,’ New Reform Club (Jan. 23, 2024, 10:13 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2024/01/is-president-amendment-xiv-section-3.html>;