The 14th Amendment was passed just after the Civil War and has a provision that no one ever thought would be relevant any more:

“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.”

This is now an issue because many groups are fighting to keep Trump off the ballot for this very reason.

It’s clear that he has “engaged in insurrection” — and if you don’t believe that, just stop reading now because you’re a hopeless cause. But that isn’t the end of the discussion. There are lots of unanswered questions, and decisions haven’t been consistent.

The Supreme Court in Colorado recently said that Trump would be removed from the primary ballots because of this, but they acknowledged that the US Supreme Court will ultimately make that decision — something that doesn’t fill a lot of us with hope, especially given that one of the chief architects of the insurrection is the wife of one of the justices.

But this certainly raises some interesting legal questions, such as:

Does this apply to the President? The amendment doesn’t say specifically, although you’d have to ask why would they leave the President out? Is the President an “office of the United States”? If so, then the President is included. But we don’t know for sure, and as you can guess, Trump’s lawyers are doing everything they can to argue this loophole.

Can the Courts tell parties how they can run their primaries? Parties set their own primaries and primaries aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Maybe because the states still run the primaries (state employees are the ones who sit at the polls, after all) the argument is that therefore the states can regulate the primaries — but that is also not clear.

Who decides someone is an insurrectionist? As I said before (and as Biden said today), it’s blatantly obvious that Trump was trying to illegally overturn an election. He clearly fits the profile. But he has not yet been found guilty of that. Perhaps we need Congress to officially declare him as an insurrectionist.

Who defines what it means to “engage in insurrection”? The Colorado Supreme Court pointed out that Trump gave a speech and encouraged the actions, did nothing to stop them, and hasn’t backed down since. Giving a speech to encourage violence is not protected under the 1st Amendment no matter what the idiots who Trump hires as lawyers say. But who knows what the Supreme Court will say?

Remember, the bottom line is this (as I emphasized in my book about the Constitution): The meaning of that document is whatever the current Supreme Court says. A different court could read the exact same document and come to a completely opposite decision (see Roe v. Wade).

So to get the answers to these questions, we’ll just have to wait and see what our corrupt, awful Supreme Court majority of members who were appointed by Presidents who lost the popular vote have to say about it.

I am not optimistic, no matter how clear it seems to me.