Opinion | If It Walks Like an Insurrection and Talks Like an Insurrection …

While we await oral argument in Trump v. Anderson — the Supreme Court case that will evaluate the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to exclude the former president from the state’s Republican primary ballot — it’s worth revisiting the arguments leveled against the Colorado court’s decision and, by extension, its interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The first and most important one is that the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol, was not an insurrection. Related to this is the argument that, even if Jan. 6 was an insurrection, it’s still not clear that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. As Jonathan Chait put it in New York magazine, “And while the violent mob storming the Capitol was certainly engaging in insurrection, Trump kept just enough distance from it — goading the crowd beforehand, refusing to call it off, but not directing its actions — to create a sliver of ambiguity as to whether he personally engaged in insurrection.”

I’ve argued before, relying on evidence drawn from an amicus brief to the Colorado Supreme Court, that the former president’s actions make him an insurrectionist by any reasonable definition of the term and certainly as it was envisioned by the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who experienced insurrection firsthand. If that isn’t persuasive, consider the evidence marshaled by the legal scholars Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar in a more recent amicus brief. They argue that top of mind for the drafters of the 14th Amendment were the actions of John B. Floyd, the secretary of war during the secession crisis of November 1860 to March 1861.

During the crucial weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln, as pro-slavery radicals organized secession conventions throughout the South, Floyd, “an unapologetic Virginia slaveholder,” Amar and Amar write, used his authority to, in the words of Ulysses S. Grant, distribute “the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.” When it became clear that President James Buchanan would not surrender Fort Sumter to South Carolina, in late December, Floyd resigned to join the Confederacy.

What’s more, the Amars note, “The insurrectionary betrayals perpetrated by Floyd and other top officials in the lame-duck Buchanan Administration went far beyond the abandonment of southern forts. They also involved, through both actions and inactions of Floyd and his allies, efforts to prevent President-elect Lincoln from lawfully assuming power at his inauguration.”

The men who wrote the 14th Amendment, partisan Republicans and strong allies of the Lincoln administration, were well aware of Floyd’s actions and wrote section 3 with him in mind. In an 1868 speech discussing the amendment, delivered on the House floor, Representative Burton C. Cook of Illinois declared that “persons who had, like Jeff Davis, Floyd and Breckinridge held high office in the government and betrayed and well-nigh ruined the government whose Constitution they had solemnly sworn to support, should not again be entrusted with power over loyal men.”