this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
1746 points (97.5% liked)
Political Memes
5613 readers
1727 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm curious why that only prevents people who have sworn an oath. Why should anyone who has engaged in insurrection be able to hold office? Forgive me if this is a dumb question, I am only half awake.
They didn't want to completely disenfranchise southerners after the Civil War. There's an argument to be made that they should have, but I can see their logic in not wanting to antagonize people while trying to put the country back together.
At the time, people were a lot more loyal to their states than to the US as a whole, so it would have been a lot like punishing patriots for fighting for their country.
Probably because they’ve proven that they won’t follow the oath they swore. So if they get reelected and swear the same oath (that they’ve already broken once) again, we already know they can’t be trusted to uphold it. So we don’t even give them the opportunity to be sworn in a second time.
But since an unsworn person never violated an oath of office, they’re still an unknown and could potentially be trusted. It’s a sort of “innocent until proven guilty” situation, where the person hasn’t broken any oath so by default they’re assumed to be trustworthy. But as soon as you break that oath, you’re not going to be trusted again.
Another situation I could see is if you had a massive power grab by an authoritarian group and a subsequent insurrection that actually led to them being overgrown. Wouldn't make sense to disqualify the ones that fought for it.
An important point. This insurrection rule could be used by fascist to retain power.