"Re the rebels and vagueness, if you were to strip them of their ability to hold office, of course you would have to have some sort of trial. What if the person said “ I wasn’t a member of the Confederacy or I’m not the same John Doe who was?” How are you going to solve that? Via a trial. And a vague law has to be clarified through litigation, of course. That’s a fundamental requirement of all law in our system."
My understanding is that Jeff Davis, in his attempt to keep from being tried for Treason used the fact that the 14th amendemnt barred him from office as an example of how a trial would constitute "double jeopardy"...
This is a pretty facsinating accout including how much he changed from what a witness experienced after meeting him on a riverboat, to the dodering old man that the same witness saw hobble into the Courthouse 2 days later...
"Not many minutes later, Davis walked out a free man, released on bail. And not too many months after that the federal government’s case against him fell apart. There’s no real consensus about why. T
he explanation that Davis’s lawyer Charles O’Conor liked best had to do with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, known as the disqualification clause, which bars from federal office anyone who has ever taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” O’Conor argued that Section 3’s ban on holding office was a form of punishment and that to try Davis for treason would therefore amount to double jeopardy. "
After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?
www.newyorker.com
I'm not sure, but it seems like he's arguing the opposite of your claim that a trial was necessary to apply the 14th, since Davis actually argued that the 14th (applied before trial) basically meant he couldn't be tried without violating the 5th and double jeopardy...
I could be wrong and I might be interpreting it incorrectly, but I was never invested too much one way or another on the ballot issue. I just mainly took issue with people on this board claiming it was a fait acompli, when it seems the analysts are at best divided. I'm personally much more interested in the resolution of the immunity issue,and the onset of the various trials...