In this episode, the host, Jesse Fries, discusses the 14th Amendment and its implications for Donald Trump's eligibility to be on the ballot. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump can be on the ballot in Colorado. The host also mentions a recent decision by the appeals court to vacate the sentences of Capitol rioters due to misinterpretation of the phrase 'administration of justice.' The host encourages listeners to support the podcast through donations.
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(00:26) Discussion on the 14th Amendment and Donald Trump's eligibility to be on the ballot
(15:12) Vacated sentences of Capitol rioters
(19:00) Value 4 Value
For the Supreme Court decision
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
For the Appeals Court decision
https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/2C10A695299E639685258AD30057A603/$file/23-3045-2043021.pdf
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
This is the mindlessly podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tuesday, March 5th, the year 20 24. Welcome to the Mindless Sea podcast. Thank you for joining us here. Today, we are going to be talking about, the 14th amendment and Donald Trump and whether or not he can be on the ballot. I think everybody probably knows by now that, he is allowed on the ballot in Colorado per the Supreme Court of the United States saying that that is okay. So we'll talk about that, and then we'll also talk about, the odd situation that happened with the January 6th guys and how some of them are gonna probably get a reduced sentence from what they originally got.
But first off, let's start with the 14th amendment and now that Donald Trump is back on the ballot. So first off, this all starts with the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment is basically trying to take away rights from the states, especially those states that rebelled during the civil war. That was why the 14th amendment was created and why it was, ratified and became part of a constitution. Now in that 14th amendment, there are 2 sections that really matter for this case that came before the Supreme Court. The first one is section 3. This one states, this is a quote from the 14th amendment. 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 be engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
But Congress may by a vote of 2 thirds of each house remove this disability. Then we also have section 5, which states the congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article. So those are the 2 sections that will be kinda talked about in the decision that allowed Trump to become to be put back on the ballot in Colorado. This decision was unanimous from the Supreme Court. Everybody said that Trump can be on the ballot, that the state cannot take him off of the ballot. This is 100% unanimous. There is no difference on that opinion. No. The difference comes there is a difference in why and everything like that or as in what how something could be done.
That is the difference here. Some people say you shouldn't have added that in, and then some people say that you should. How this broke down though was basically the idea that this was all about federal power. The one thing that the reformation or not Reformation, but the one thing that came about right after the Civil War, the Reconstruction was that the federal government had to impose new power on itself. They had to take rights away from the states, and by doing that, they really solidified the power of the federal government that we have today. And this is what the very basis of this argument was was all about federal power.
The majority, it was 5 people. It was, Justice Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. They signed onto the majority opinion. Their basic idea for why Trump had to be allowed on the ballot was that the 14th amendment expanded federal power at the expense of the state autonomy, and this fundamentally altered the balance of state and federal power struck by the Constitution. So before the 14th amendment, states had a lot more power than they did after the 14th amendment is what they are saying. They say that section 1 of the amendment for which was for the instance for instance, bars the states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.
This was really to give rights to the freed slaves and anybody else that was a minority and everything like this. This was trying to ensure that everybody had the same rights. And then in that, there's also section 5, which confers to congress the power to enforce those prohibitions along with other provisions of the amendment by appropriate legislation. That is, one of the hang ups, in between the two parties on the Supreme Court is that section 5 of, the 14th amendment. And because of that section 5, which said appropriate legislation, there was actually an enforcement act of 18 70. That act authorized federal district attorneys to bring civil actions to federal court to remove anyone holding non legislative office, federal or state, in violation of Section 3.
And so this was a way for you to take somebody out of the system, but it had to be a civil action in federal courts. Now you have to underline the federal part about that. It is a federal matter. It is not a state matter. The states can do it with if it's for a state office, but if it's for a federal office, the states cannot do it. Part of the reasoning for this, especially when it comes to the level of presidency, is that different levels of proof are needed in each state. Take Colorado. They took a legislative fact gathering mission and everything that came from that about January 6th and then they used that to remove him from the ballot.
But it was just a congress trying to find what happened, but it wasn't actually a court of law. There was actually nothing about a court of law in that, but they use that as proof to remove him from the ballot. It wasn't a court. It wasn't anything like that, so there's that. And then you have Maine. Maine, it was just the secretary of State. I forget her name. But the Secretary of State just by herself decided that he was an insurrectionist, and so he should not be on the ballot, which is a completely different matter than Colorado. And so it's these different differing ways of doing it that could cause a major problem because some states would require, like, a actual criminal trial. Some would require a civil trial. Some, wouldn't require anything at all. Just one person saying, yeah. He let's take him off the ballot. And because of that, one state cannot take away the rights of other citizens and federal officers owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not a portion of the people of the United States.
Powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically delegated to rather than reserved by the states. What is this is saying is that the 14th amendment dictates the what it takes to become a president and things like that. You a state has no right to say that that person cannot be president because that negates every other state's rights and also every person's rights in the federal system. In that majority opinion, they ended it by saying, in our view, each of these reasons is necessary to provide a complete explanation for the judgment the court unanimously reaches.
Now there were 2 other concurring opinions, and the first one was by Justice Barrett. She was cool with, basically, everything that the first one said, but she said that did that the decision does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which section 3 can be enforced, which is also what the liberal justices said, the other concurring that, dissented slightly in the whole overall arcing thing. Justice Barrett went on to say that all 9 justices agreed on the outcome of the case, and that is the message Americans should take home. Basically, she's saying, it doesn't really matter why We all agreed anyways. Even if we had small little differences here or there, in the end, Trump can be on the ballot. That's it. We all agree on that.
So go amongst yourself. This was not a political thing. But then you get the liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. They said that states cannot use their control over the ballot to undermine the national government. That is why they are saying it's okay for Trump to be on the ballot because the states cannot use their control. The danger they go on to say is even greater in the context of a presidential election. State restrictions in that context implicate a uniquely important national interest extending beyond a state's own borders. Generally, the one thing about the constitution is that if it goes beyond a state's borders, it is a federal issue. This is travel. This is commerce. This is everything. This is water. If it goes across the state line, then it is a federal matter, not a state's issue matter.
They go on to say to say, no doubt states have significant authority over presidential electors and in turn presidential elections. That power, however, is limited by other constitutional constraints, including federalism principles. So the whole idea of fed federalism is the basis for this. For a federal power, it is not a democracy. It is a more of a republic where each state has a right to put into the federal power, not just one state dictating. This isn't like the EU where you need every EU country to actually agree to something. That is not federalism. Federalism is where you all combine and you say, for the good of the whole, we are okay to lose sometimes and win sometimes, and that is the part of the how it works in the federal system.
The liberal justices went on to say that the Reconstruction amendments were specifically designed as expansion of federal power and an intrusion on state sovereignty. This was a whole point of the Reconstruction amendments was to limit state's sovereignty. They go on to say section 3 marked the first time the constitution placed substantive limits on the state's authority to choose its own officials. Given that context, it would defy logic for section 3 to give states new powers to determine how may who may hold the presidency. So, basically, what they are saying there is that the constitution or the 14th Amendment states that a state has to do what the federal government says when it comes to certain things, who can be in office and everything like that. But nothing in the 14th Amendment allows a state to do the reverse, to tell the federal system who can be on the ballot.
So that is what they are trying to say there. They go on to say to allow Colorado to take a presidential candidate off the ballot under section 3 would imperil the framers' vision of a federal government directly responsible to the people. They also say, although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce section 3, we we protest the majority's effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision. Because we can only decide only the issue before us, we can only in the judgment, not in the actual mess of, what the majority said.
Part of this is down to that last section, the section 5. I in all essence, that section 5 did not need to be there. Section 5, if you don't remember, it stated that the congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article. Generally, amendment to the constitution does not need that in there because it's in the Constitution so that is the law. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and so you really don't need a section 5 to allow that to happen. But in the 14th Amendment, they added that in to the amendment, which kind of causes an issue of whether or not it is needed, whether it's not.
Does congress have to enforce it, or will it just be enforced as is? It's kind of a weird situation. The conservative judges minus Barrett say that you do need congress to actually do something about it, but then the liberal judges and possibly a little bit of Barrett, they say that you don't because the other sections are clear and understandable so you don't actually need section 5 or you shouldn't pay attention to section 5. It's a bit of a complicated thing, but that's basically what it boils down to. Okay. So I finally got that up, and it looks like we are recording this time, at least. I tried to do this yesterday when it was hot news, but then, yeah, I forgot to turn on the mic. So I talked for 20 minutes about nothing, even though I was talking about the same thing.
That that wasn't very fun. But, you know, what can you do? We all make mistakes in life. Right? Okay. From there, let's quickly just talk about the decision by appeals court of the district the circuit of the of District of Columbia appeals court. They ruled and vacated the capitol rider's sentence, which impacted dozens of January 6 cases. Basically, what the idea of this whole thing was that they said that the sentencing was wrong, because the government was misinterpreting the phrase administration of justice. They said they were being ambiguous with that. And so because of that, the sentencing has been vacated, especially for the administration of justice enhancements, which basically means that those enhancements mean that they're gonna spend longer in jail than without those enhancements. So, basically, the appeals court said that those enhancements are bogus, that they should have never been done because and in the nitty gritty of it, they say this is because congress's certification of electoral college votes does not fit the administration of justice mold.
Administration of justice, they said they said that it historically refers to judicial and investigative processes. So, basically, if it's going on in the courthouse, if you're trying to witness tamper, if you're trying to burn documents and things like that so that the investigators cannot find it, that is trying to pervert the administration of justice. And because of that, those things can be, those can have the enhancement. But congress certification for electoral college votes, it is not administration of justice is what they are saying. They said that the government engaged in definitional divide and conquer, dissecting the phrase administration of justice and then invoking the most favorable favorable meaning of each word in isolation.
So, basically, what with that so the government, the prosecutors, were saying that so they took administration, and then they took justice, and then they parsed those two things, and then they came up with this convoluted reason why all of these January sixers were trying to pervert or stop the administration of justice. And so because of that, they had the administration of justice enhancement put on there. Some justices, or some judges said that's okay and everything like that, but the DC Circuit of Appeals, all all of them, I don't know who put them in or anything like that, but they all said, yeah. That cannot happen.
That is just going a bit too far. They did back up, the conviction and everything like that, but they said that the enhancements are just wrong. So, basically, this is gonna be kicked down, and then they will have to get a new sentence. They'll have to go through the sentencing stage once again. So there's that. It's a little bit interesting, and I thought I'd bring that up at the same time because these are both about, like, Trump and January 6th and everything like that. So I thought I would just bring those up real quick since it was quickly in the news. And, last week, I didn't get to do a podcast, because, well, we were out of town, so I wasn't able to do that. So I will do today's, and then I'll probably do another one Thursday or Friday for this week's.
Remember here at the Mindless Sea, we are a value for value podcast, so please give us your donations. Give us what you can, whatever you think is valuable. It could be a dollar. It could be $50. It could be anything. Whatever you think what I am doing is worth, please just send a donation. You can go to podcast. Mindlesssea.com. Everything is in the show notes. You can just go there to that website, and then you can donate. It is through PayPal, and we can, I would love to do that so we can actually keep this podcast going? So please do that. If you want to also submit some talent or something like that, if you have some artwork or you have some research or anything like that you would want me to talk about, that would be cool too. And with your donations, if you wanna just have a little letter in there that you want to me to read for you, that would be fine as well. Please send that along. As long as it's airworthy, I will do that for you.
So please, help us out here so we can keep this going. I am enjoying it, and, hopefully, you're enjoying it. That's the main thing. I can pontificate all day long if I really want to, but it is your podcast if you wanna help me out with that. And so I will see you then on Thursday or Friday. I'm not quite sure exactly when I'll do the podcast, but I will see you then. Thank you very much. This is the mindlessly podcast.
This is the mindlessly podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tuesday, March 5th, the year 20 24. Welcome to the Mindless Sea podcast. Thank you for joining us here. Today, we are going to be talking about, the 14th amendment and Donald Trump and whether or not he can be on the ballot. I think everybody probably knows by now that, he is allowed on the ballot in Colorado per the Supreme Court of the United States saying that that is okay. So we'll talk about that, and then we'll also talk about, the odd situation that happened with the January 6th guys and how some of them are gonna probably get a reduced sentence from what they originally got.
But first off, let's start with the 14th amendment and now that Donald Trump is back on the ballot. So first off, this all starts with the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment is basically trying to take away rights from the states, especially those states that rebelled during the civil war. That was why the 14th amendment was created and why it was, ratified and became part of a constitution. Now in that 14th amendment, there are 2 sections that really matter for this case that came before the Supreme Court. The first one is section 3. This one states, this is a quote from the 14th amendment. 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 be engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
But Congress may by a vote of 2 thirds of each house remove this disability. Then we also have section 5, which states the congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article. So those are the 2 sections that will be kinda talked about in the decision that allowed Trump to become to be put back on the ballot in Colorado. This decision was unanimous from the Supreme Court. Everybody said that Trump can be on the ballot, that the state cannot take him off of the ballot. This is 100% unanimous. There is no difference on that opinion. No. The difference comes there is a difference in why and everything like that or as in what how something could be done.
That is the difference here. Some people say you shouldn't have added that in, and then some people say that you should. How this broke down though was basically the idea that this was all about federal power. The one thing that the reformation or not Reformation, but the one thing that came about right after the Civil War, the Reconstruction was that the federal government had to impose new power on itself. They had to take rights away from the states, and by doing that, they really solidified the power of the federal government that we have today. And this is what the very basis of this argument was was all about federal power.
The majority, it was 5 people. It was, Justice Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. They signed onto the majority opinion. Their basic idea for why Trump had to be allowed on the ballot was that the 14th amendment expanded federal power at the expense of the state autonomy, and this fundamentally altered the balance of state and federal power struck by the Constitution. So before the 14th amendment, states had a lot more power than they did after the 14th amendment is what they are saying. They say that section 1 of the amendment for which was for the instance for instance, bars the states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.
This was really to give rights to the freed slaves and anybody else that was a minority and everything like this. This was trying to ensure that everybody had the same rights. And then in that, there's also section 5, which confers to congress the power to enforce those prohibitions along with other provisions of the amendment by appropriate legislation. That is, one of the hang ups, in between the two parties on the Supreme Court is that section 5 of, the 14th amendment. And because of that section 5, which said appropriate legislation, there was actually an enforcement act of 18 70. That act authorized federal district attorneys to bring civil actions to federal court to remove anyone holding non legislative office, federal or state, in violation of Section 3.
And so this was a way for you to take somebody out of the system, but it had to be a civil action in federal courts. Now you have to underline the federal part about that. It is a federal matter. It is not a state matter. The states can do it with if it's for a state office, but if it's for a federal office, the states cannot do it. Part of the reasoning for this, especially when it comes to the level of presidency, is that different levels of proof are needed in each state. Take Colorado. They took a legislative fact gathering mission and everything that came from that about January 6th and then they used that to remove him from the ballot.
But it was just a congress trying to find what happened, but it wasn't actually a court of law. There was actually nothing about a court of law in that, but they use that as proof to remove him from the ballot. It wasn't a court. It wasn't anything like that, so there's that. And then you have Maine. Maine, it was just the secretary of State. I forget her name. But the Secretary of State just by herself decided that he was an insurrectionist, and so he should not be on the ballot, which is a completely different matter than Colorado. And so it's these different differing ways of doing it that could cause a major problem because some states would require, like, a actual criminal trial. Some would require a civil trial. Some, wouldn't require anything at all. Just one person saying, yeah. He let's take him off the ballot. And because of that, one state cannot take away the rights of other citizens and federal officers owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not a portion of the people of the United States.
Powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically delegated to rather than reserved by the states. What is this is saying is that the 14th amendment dictates the what it takes to become a president and things like that. You a state has no right to say that that person cannot be president because that negates every other state's rights and also every person's rights in the federal system. In that majority opinion, they ended it by saying, in our view, each of these reasons is necessary to provide a complete explanation for the judgment the court unanimously reaches.
Now there were 2 other concurring opinions, and the first one was by Justice Barrett. She was cool with, basically, everything that the first one said, but she said that did that the decision does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which section 3 can be enforced, which is also what the liberal justices said, the other concurring that, dissented slightly in the whole overall arcing thing. Justice Barrett went on to say that all 9 justices agreed on the outcome of the case, and that is the message Americans should take home. Basically, she's saying, it doesn't really matter why We all agreed anyways. Even if we had small little differences here or there, in the end, Trump can be on the ballot. That's it. We all agree on that.
So go amongst yourself. This was not a political thing. But then you get the liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. They said that states cannot use their control over the ballot to undermine the national government. That is why they are saying it's okay for Trump to be on the ballot because the states cannot use their control. The danger they go on to say is even greater in the context of a presidential election. State restrictions in that context implicate a uniquely important national interest extending beyond a state's own borders. Generally, the one thing about the constitution is that if it goes beyond a state's borders, it is a federal issue. This is travel. This is commerce. This is everything. This is water. If it goes across the state line, then it is a federal matter, not a state's issue matter.
They go on to say to say, no doubt states have significant authority over presidential electors and in turn presidential elections. That power, however, is limited by other constitutional constraints, including federalism principles. So the whole idea of fed federalism is the basis for this. For a federal power, it is not a democracy. It is a more of a republic where each state has a right to put into the federal power, not just one state dictating. This isn't like the EU where you need every EU country to actually agree to something. That is not federalism. Federalism is where you all combine and you say, for the good of the whole, we are okay to lose sometimes and win sometimes, and that is the part of the how it works in the federal system.
The liberal justices went on to say that the Reconstruction amendments were specifically designed as expansion of federal power and an intrusion on state sovereignty. This was a whole point of the Reconstruction amendments was to limit state's sovereignty. They go on to say section 3 marked the first time the constitution placed substantive limits on the state's authority to choose its own officials. Given that context, it would defy logic for section 3 to give states new powers to determine how may who may hold the presidency. So, basically, what they are saying there is that the constitution or the 14th Amendment states that a state has to do what the federal government says when it comes to certain things, who can be in office and everything like that. But nothing in the 14th Amendment allows a state to do the reverse, to tell the federal system who can be on the ballot.
So that is what they are trying to say there. They go on to say to allow Colorado to take a presidential candidate off the ballot under section 3 would imperil the framers' vision of a federal government directly responsible to the people. They also say, although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce section 3, we we protest the majority's effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision. Because we can only decide only the issue before us, we can only in the judgment, not in the actual mess of, what the majority said.
Part of this is down to that last section, the section 5. I in all essence, that section 5 did not need to be there. Section 5, if you don't remember, it stated that the congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article. Generally, amendment to the constitution does not need that in there because it's in the Constitution so that is the law. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and so you really don't need a section 5 to allow that to happen. But in the 14th Amendment, they added that in to the amendment, which kind of causes an issue of whether or not it is needed, whether it's not.
Does congress have to enforce it, or will it just be enforced as is? It's kind of a weird situation. The conservative judges minus Barrett say that you do need congress to actually do something about it, but then the liberal judges and possibly a little bit of Barrett, they say that you don't because the other sections are clear and understandable so you don't actually need section 5 or you shouldn't pay attention to section 5. It's a bit of a complicated thing, but that's basically what it boils down to. Okay. So I finally got that up, and it looks like we are recording this time, at least. I tried to do this yesterday when it was hot news, but then, yeah, I forgot to turn on the mic. So I talked for 20 minutes about nothing, even though I was talking about the same thing.
That that wasn't very fun. But, you know, what can you do? We all make mistakes in life. Right? Okay. From there, let's quickly just talk about the decision by appeals court of the district the circuit of the of District of Columbia appeals court. They ruled and vacated the capitol rider's sentence, which impacted dozens of January 6 cases. Basically, what the idea of this whole thing was that they said that the sentencing was wrong, because the government was misinterpreting the phrase administration of justice. They said they were being ambiguous with that. And so because of that, the sentencing has been vacated, especially for the administration of justice enhancements, which basically means that those enhancements mean that they're gonna spend longer in jail than without those enhancements. So, basically, the appeals court said that those enhancements are bogus, that they should have never been done because and in the nitty gritty of it, they say this is because congress's certification of electoral college votes does not fit the administration of justice mold.
Administration of justice, they said they said that it historically refers to judicial and investigative processes. So, basically, if it's going on in the courthouse, if you're trying to witness tamper, if you're trying to burn documents and things like that so that the investigators cannot find it, that is trying to pervert the administration of justice. And because of that, those things can be, those can have the enhancement. But congress certification for electoral college votes, it is not administration of justice is what they are saying. They said that the government engaged in definitional divide and conquer, dissecting the phrase administration of justice and then invoking the most favorable favorable meaning of each word in isolation.
So, basically, what with that so the government, the prosecutors, were saying that so they took administration, and then they took justice, and then they parsed those two things, and then they came up with this convoluted reason why all of these January sixers were trying to pervert or stop the administration of justice. And so because of that, they had the administration of justice enhancement put on there. Some justices, or some judges said that's okay and everything like that, but the DC Circuit of Appeals, all all of them, I don't know who put them in or anything like that, but they all said, yeah. That cannot happen.
That is just going a bit too far. They did back up, the conviction and everything like that, but they said that the enhancements are just wrong. So, basically, this is gonna be kicked down, and then they will have to get a new sentence. They'll have to go through the sentencing stage once again. So there's that. It's a little bit interesting, and I thought I'd bring that up at the same time because these are both about, like, Trump and January 6th and everything like that. So I thought I would just bring those up real quick since it was quickly in the news. And, last week, I didn't get to do a podcast, because, well, we were out of town, so I wasn't able to do that. So I will do today's, and then I'll probably do another one Thursday or Friday for this week's.
Remember here at the Mindless Sea, we are a value for value podcast, so please give us your donations. Give us what you can, whatever you think is valuable. It could be a dollar. It could be $50. It could be anything. Whatever you think what I am doing is worth, please just send a donation. You can go to podcast. Mindlesssea.com. Everything is in the show notes. You can just go there to that website, and then you can donate. It is through PayPal, and we can, I would love to do that so we can actually keep this podcast going? So please do that. If you want to also submit some talent or something like that, if you have some artwork or you have some research or anything like that you would want me to talk about, that would be cool too. And with your donations, if you wanna just have a little letter in there that you want to me to read for you, that would be fine as well. Please send that along. As long as it's airworthy, I will do that for you.
So please, help us out here so we can keep this going. I am enjoying it, and, hopefully, you're enjoying it. That's the main thing. I can pontificate all day long if I really want to, but it is your podcast if you wanna help me out with that. And so I will see you then on Thursday or Friday. I'm not quite sure exactly when I'll do the podcast, but I will see you then. Thank you very much. This is the mindlessly podcast.
