Once more into the breach—and this will be brief (ha)—created by the case to be heard by the Supreme Court tomorrow regarding Colorado’s applying Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to throwing Trump off the ballot. I expect to hear some reference to the decision in
First, one's age is an objective fact; defining an "insurrection" is much less so. (Waves vaguely at Blue Tribe people claiming one occurred and others claiming one did not.) There's no judgment in a state saying "you're not 35".
Second, if 270 electoral votes come in for a kid, or for a non-native citizen, or for Micky Mouse, it would be up to Congress to select the POTUS. If Congress selects someone who's plainly Constitutionally unqualified? Well then we're boned.
I think you may be a bit too sure of the meaning of "objective" not to mention the meaning of "fact." Even good lawyers often elide this question, but philosophers can't, and certainly historians, even historians of ideas, run into trouble with it.
OTOH, I don't think an appeal to philosophy will decide the question of whether Article 3 is "self-executing." I like appeals to precedent, and I'd ask the lawyers if there's any precedent for that "self-executing" idea in our long legal history.
A history of which several Justices of the Supreme Court seem woefully, deliberately, and quite unprofessionally ignorant. Can historians teach them in an amicus brief? Can historians teach them anything? Princeton's classic History course in constitutional law (which Michele Obama took) clearly failed to teach the undergraduate Sam Alito anything about several key issues on which he has unhesitatingly written badly informed opinions.
And I don't think there was ever a course Alito could have taken in any school he went to that dealt with the long, complicated and now better and better known history of (deliberate) pregnancy termination.
In any context, one must take some things as axioms, things given beyond which we do not press our investigation. Otherwise every inquiry becomes like a two-year-old's infinite regress of "why? why? why? why? why?"
Presumably a person presenting themselves to a state government as a candidate for election has a government issued ID with a birthdate on it. If a candidate then argued that the birthdate was inaccurate ("I was born at home, the birth certificate was issued later, and I've just learned from my mother that she gave the wrong date so that the official records wouldn't say I was conceived out of wedlock, I'm actually three months older than that piece of paper says"), that would be a matter for another department of some government to address. Thus, from the the perspective of the election board, "Joe Doe's birth certificate says he is/is not old enough to qualify as President, that's his legal age" is as objective a fact as you're going to find -- even if when we put on our philosopher or historian hats, Joe's age may be questionable.
If you don't like "objective", perhaps describing it as "someone else's problem" tickles your fancy more.
But even that, I think, is tangential to the point that 1. the state legislatures get to pick how the electors are chosen, so if they pick a process that picks electors who vote for someone underage (or not a natural born citizen, or whatever), so be it; and 2. it's ultimately, Constitutionally, up to Congress to disqualify those electoral votes.
Is the age requirement “self-executing? If I’m 27 and millions want me on the ballot, what is to prevent that?
First, one's age is an objective fact; defining an "insurrection" is much less so. (Waves vaguely at Blue Tribe people claiming one occurred and others claiming one did not.) There's no judgment in a state saying "you're not 35".
Second, if 270 electoral votes come in for a kid, or for a non-native citizen, or for Micky Mouse, it would be up to Congress to select the POTUS. If Congress selects someone who's plainly Constitutionally unqualified? Well then we're boned.
I don’t see where we disagree that you agree that even an acknowledged fact requires intervention by one or both of the other branches of government.
I think you may be a bit too sure of the meaning of "objective" not to mention the meaning of "fact." Even good lawyers often elide this question, but philosophers can't, and certainly historians, even historians of ideas, run into trouble with it.
OTOH, I don't think an appeal to philosophy will decide the question of whether Article 3 is "self-executing." I like appeals to precedent, and I'd ask the lawyers if there's any precedent for that "self-executing" idea in our long legal history.
A history of which several Justices of the Supreme Court seem woefully, deliberately, and quite unprofessionally ignorant. Can historians teach them in an amicus brief? Can historians teach them anything? Princeton's classic History course in constitutional law (which Michele Obama took) clearly failed to teach the undergraduate Sam Alito anything about several key issues on which he has unhesitatingly written badly informed opinions.
And I don't think there was ever a course Alito could have taken in any school he went to that dealt with the long, complicated and now better and better known history of (deliberate) pregnancy termination.
In any context, one must take some things as axioms, things given beyond which we do not press our investigation. Otherwise every inquiry becomes like a two-year-old's infinite regress of "why? why? why? why? why?"
Presumably a person presenting themselves to a state government as a candidate for election has a government issued ID with a birthdate on it. If a candidate then argued that the birthdate was inaccurate ("I was born at home, the birth certificate was issued later, and I've just learned from my mother that she gave the wrong date so that the official records wouldn't say I was conceived out of wedlock, I'm actually three months older than that piece of paper says"), that would be a matter for another department of some government to address. Thus, from the the perspective of the election board, "Joe Doe's birth certificate says he is/is not old enough to qualify as President, that's his legal age" is as objective a fact as you're going to find -- even if when we put on our philosopher or historian hats, Joe's age may be questionable.
If you don't like "objective", perhaps describing it as "someone else's problem" tickles your fancy more.
But even that, I think, is tangential to the point that 1. the state legislatures get to pick how the electors are chosen, so if they pick a process that picks electors who vote for someone underage (or not a natural born citizen, or whatever), so be it; and 2. it's ultimately, Constitutionally, up to Congress to disqualify those electoral votes.
Quite right, Tom. I think.