Original Intent

In wake of the courts in Colorado and the secretary of state in Maine each ruling that Donald Trump should be disqualified from their state ballots due to his considerable role in the insurrection effort after his defeat in the 2020 election, a lot of commentators on the right are arguing that Donald Trump, uh, did not, in fact, play a considerable role in the insurrection effort.

First and foremost, I should once again stress, as I have before here, that there’s nothing unusual about disqualifying a candidate from office on these grounds. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment is abundantly clear and, in the wake of the Civil War, the Congress that drafted the insurrection clause had no trouble putting it to use to bar people they deemed insurrectionists.

It’s a bit rich that the same conservative legal theorists who pride themselves on an “originalist” approach to the Constitution — where the intent of the authors matters above all else — have twisted themselves into knots trying to read the clear, simple language of the Fourteenth Amendment while somehow squinting through a microscope to discover nearly unlimited rights to modern weapons of war in the Second Amendment. The constitutional mandate is clear.

Because prior politicians have been barred for insurrection, the current crop of Trump toadies is forced at some level to accept the principle and instead to argue that what Trump did didn’t actually constitute an insurrection.

They’ve done this, in part, as Jill Lepore has argued well here, by ignoring the months of political maneuvering and machinations the Trump White House employed to steal the election and just narrowly focusing on the January 6th assault on the Capitol. And then the next step is to declare that event wasn’t actually an “insurrection” and Trump bore no responsibility for it.

Well, let’s roll the tape.

Three years ago, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind — not even leading Republicans — that there had been an insurrection and that Donald Trump was responsible for it.

Right after the attacks on January 6th, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell referred to it as a “failed insurrection.” “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he said. “They failed. They failed.”

Senator Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee for president, agreed and placed blame at the 2020 nominee’s feet. “This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection.”

Former President George W. Bush denounced the “mayhem” that had come with the “violent assault on the Capitol.” “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” he insisted.

A week later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pinned blame for the riot directly on Trump. “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” he said in the House. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”

A month later, when the Senate was hearing Trump’s second impeachment trial, even his own lawyers accepted that January 6th constituted an insurrection. “The question before us is not whether there was a violent insurrection of the Capitol,” Trump’s own attorney Michael Van Der Veen told the Senate. “On that point, everyone agrees.”

On the first anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, Mitch McConnell rebuked the Republican National Committee for claiming it was “legitimate political discourse” in no uncertain terms. “We all were here,” he noted at a press conference in January 2022. “We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

And indeed, that’s what it was.

Now, I haven’t employed my hard-won historian’s skills of “Googling things” to point out the hypocrisy of Republicans here in any hopes of shaming them, but rather to remind those who might somehow be swayed by their claims that this is purely gaslighting on their part. When it happened, everyone agreed that there was a long campaign to overturn an election, one that began with illegal political pressure and ended with a call to violent rebellion, and that Trump did bear responsibility for it.

And he still does.

To circle back, you’d think that a party so obsessed with “original intent” would, at the very least, remember how they originally reacted to the violent insurrection that had many of them, quite literally, in its crosshairs.

But if they won’t, the rest of us will.