this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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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.