Feb. 8, 2024, will be recorded as a significant milestone in our American experience — a day that if one looks back carefully will reveal more than just a few flaws in our efforts to live up to both our ideals and the values deeply embedded in our democratic institutions by our Framers.
We too frequently forget that America has had no fewer than two sets of Framers.
Most historians would likely recognize our original Framers — commonly called the Founders — and the next Founding generation that arose after the Civil War — the Reconstruction Founders.
It was this group of Leaders — the Reconstruction Founders — who were before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Feb. 8 beclouded oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the case reviewing the Colorado decision to remove former President Donald Trump from that state’s ballot.
And, it was the spirit of those Reconstruction Founders which wholly eluded those justices as the arguments proceeded, for reasons I am still contemplating.
As one commentator wrote: “It is strange, too, that the court, which in past years has made dramatic and ruinous changes to American life out of its professed loyalty to our nation’s ‘history and traditions,’ chose to more or less completely ignore the suggestions of history here.”
But, in the case of a crucial Reconstruction Era amendment, fashioned after the loss of over half a million Americans who died to both reunite the Union and to vindicate Abraham Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” the nine justices — with maybe one or two exceptions — seemed as if they were interpreting a principle of an ancient and foreign treaty.
It was as if they knew nothing of (or simply ignored) our own history.
The meaning and purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and its permanent and unequivocal demand that insurrectionists against our Constitution, and against the rights secured by those Second Founders, must be excluded from holding office in our republic, seemed as strange to these justices as would outdoor plumbing or the workings of a cotton gin.
It seemed there was simply no place in the minds and experience of the majority of the justices to imagine that an American political leader — especially a wealthy white male — might be cut from the very same anti-democracy cloth as were the 19th century men and women who met in 11 Southern states in the early 1860s to pass secession ordinances and later engage this nation for fours years of brutal bloodshed.
There was likewise no place in the justices’ experience to conceive of the fact that even after the Civil War formally ended that white Southerners engaged in a widespread and persistent reign of terror against newly free Blacks still living in the South — a terrorism that was arguably as organized and certainly as violent as the war of rebellion itself; a reign of terror aimed at defeating Reconstruction and the progress which would only arrive for Black Americans some 90 years after the official end of the Civil War.
It was for these reasons — some well known to the Reconstruction Founders, some only perhaps anticipated — that they wrote the language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment: to exclude then and henceforward and forever those who might engage their countrymen in an insurrection against the meaning of our Constitution.
The tragedy of Feb. 8, 2024, for future historians will not be that a single demagogic politician would likely be permitted to stand for office, but rather that our Highest Court simply could no longer see the purpose for which that Reconstruction Amendment was adopted — that they could no longer either remember or fully understand the meaning of the words proclaimed on a battlefield as Lincoln prayed for this nation to at last have “a new birth of freedom.”
Goins lives in White Bear Lake.
