Legal Odds and Ends

Heather Cox Richardson in a recent "Letters from an American" Substack underlines my annoyance that no Democrat challenged the sitting of a member of Congress on 14A, Sec. 3 grounds:

On January 6, 2021, then-Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) told Jordan to get away from her because “You f*ck*ng did this!” 

Yesterday, in a speech at the University of Minnesota, Cheney explained: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives. Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election…. There was a handful of people, of which he was the leader, who knew what Donald Trump had planned. Now somebody needs to ask Jim Jordan, ‘Why didn’t you report to the Capitol Police what you knew Donald Trump had planned? You were in those meetings at the White House.’”

She concluded: “If the Republicans decide that Jim Jordan should be the Speaker of the House…there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”

Ah. Jim Jordan, a leading option for Speaker of the House now that Kevin McCarthy has been deposed by Matt Gaetz and the rest of the infamous eight. Somewhat related, a supporter of the usage of the provision flagged two dissenters to the refusal of women's suffrage back in 1871.

Victoria Woodhull's 1871 petition requested a declaration that Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. This was before she decided to go respectable in the mid-1870s though she did live to see the 19th Amendment ratified. The Loughridge/Butler (Minority) Report, including this bit of interpretative analysis:

[T]he Constitution necessarily deals in general principles; these principles are to be carried out to their legitimate conclusion and result by legislation, and we are to judge of the intention of those who established the Constitution by what they say, guided by what they declare on the face of the instrument to be their object.

The dissenters, including a former state judge, rejected a form of "original understanding" that did not recognize women's suffrage. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment, including a general reference to "citizen," should be the test. And, broad "general principles" is the name of the game.  

Meanwhile, back to the Trump-packed Supreme Court. Monday is a holiday (the three-day Columbus or Whatever You Call It Day weekend coming early this year), but Eugene Scalia will be up later in the week. Facing him will not be a child of a justice, but Sotomayor's former law clerk. 

We did have an order drop on Friday. The winding "ghost gun" battles continued as Justice Alito dropped an administrative stay to have time to examine things. Those who closely watch Strict Scrutiny Podcast's favorite justice (in a hate/love sort of way, especially as he dropped a dog hypo this week; all three hosts have dogs) know he has dropped multiple stays (he has the troublesome Fifth Circuit) in recent memory, including one that ran out without any further action on the Supreme Court level.

(Another gun case, a rare re-submission to another justice, is being examined now, supposedly due to be summarily rejected on Tuesday.)

And, after listening to him on the Freedom From Religion podcast, I read Steven Green's Inventing A Christian America book. The 2015 book has a supportive blurb from John Fea, an evangelist historian who wrote a volume on a related subject. Fea later wrote a book as one of the minority of anti-Trump evangelists. He is also a Mets fan. Can find him on C-SPAN.

The term "myth" is the more academic meaning of an explanation of events that help define how a society sees itself. The book is generally interesting but somewhat too academic. It also drops terms like "millennialism" like everyone knows what it means and notes Puritans left England after being persecuted (to some degree) without actually providing details of specifically what that entailed. Covers a lot of ground.