Clarification on Amendment XIV Amendment XIV says: But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. What does it mean? A State can abridge the right to vote of persons 21 years of age or older except in case of rebellion or any other crime? It seems logical it would be the contrary: irt could not abridge the right to vote except for rebellion or any other crime
It says if some portion of the electorate is deprived of the right to vote then the state looses an equal proportion of its representation in Congress (and therefore electoral college votes). There is an exception &quot;rebellion, or other crime&quot;. So if a state disenfranchises X% of the population for rebellion or crime they do not lose X% of their representatives/electors.
The only way that a member of the House of Representatives, or a U.S. Senator can be removed from office (other than by resignation, death, or expiration of a term of office without being re-elected) is by a two-thirds vote of the chamber removing that member. The relevant provision of the United States Constitution is Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 which states: Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member. So, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives may be removed by a two-thirds vote of the U.S. House, and a U.S. Senator may be removed by a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate. This has been done five times since 1789 in the U.S. House, most recently in 2002. It has been done fifteen times since 1789 in the U.S. Senate (the most recent 14 times in 1861 and 1862 in connection with the U.S. Civil War). The case of William Blount in 1797 established the precedent that expulsion of a member by a chamber, rather than impeachment, is the proper process to remove a member of Congress. Members of Congress may not be recalled, and are not automatically removed from office upon conviction of a crime. Apart from the expulsion process, there is no way for voters or states to remove U.S. Senators not from their own state, something that doesn't make sense to be possible in the overall context of the structure of the United States government under the U.S. Constitution. Senate Rule XXIII in part provides that ``if the impeachment shall not, upon any of the articles presented, be sustained by the votes of two-thirds of the members present, a judgment of acquittal shall be entered;'' A quorum of the full Senate and not just those sworn in for the trial is required. The Senate rules in the case of an expulsion of a member are analogous.
Such an order, like all other orders and decisions, is voted on at a conference of justices. Normally all 9 are present and vote, unless one or more is recused. But if one or more happens to be absent, those present vote. A majority of those present an voting is enough for such an order. Dissents from such orders are quite unusual, but any justice may file one if s/he so elects. Reasons for such orders are not normally provided. The usual standard is that such relief is only granted if A) one party will be irreparably harmed by delay, and B) that party has a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on the merits when the matter is finally decided. Presumably a majority of the Justices did not feel that this standard was met. Beyond that, no one can say.
with the new movement by some states to require voters to have identification to vote, and the fact that no state I know of provides free government issued ID (unless you are an employee) it seems that unless a state provided its residents with free access to state-issued ID, that requiring people to go pay for ID's needed to vote would be contrary to the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. This specific issue (which is much easier to address than the general question) has been litigated, and in some cases, it has been a successful argument. It is pretty much acknowledged now that requiring a fee for all documents required in order to have ID necessary to vote violates the 24th Amendment. But, the states that enacted these requirements knew that and tried to get around it by making at least one form of voter ID free, which prevents the statutes from being facially invalid. This isn't the end of the question, however: Voter ID laws, enacted in 11 states over the past two years, require voters to show a government-issued photo ID that the state will provide for free. But while the ID is free, the documents residents need to prove their identity in order to get that ID, such as a birth certificate, are not. Now, lots of people already have documents like birth certificates that were purchased by their parents at their birth and are now available to them for free. But, that isn't always the case. This raises the question of whether there is an "as applied" violation of the 24th Amendment in the cases of someone who can't prove their entitlement to compliant voter ID without paying for it, and if so, what the proper remedy is for the violation. These issues are still being actively litigated and haven't been definitively resolved on a national basis in all circumstances.
I apologize if I'm grossly misinterpreting things here. You are grossly misinterpreting things here. Your mistakes aren't terribly uncommon, but you are completely and totally wrong in what you are suggesting. Does the above bolded part correspond to breaking any specific laws? That is, how would one show that a person engaged in insurrection or rebellion, or given comfort to enemies? The language intentionally mimics the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution, which is treason, defined in U.S. Constitution, Article III. If this could be demonstrated by finding someone guilty of a particular law, in theory couldn't someone bring federal charges against Trump for doing so? (assuming one of his many bad faith acts like cooperating with Russian election interference, or tweeting classified information appeared to be breaking said law). None of the things you imagine could constitute treason. 'Enemy&quot; is a term of art that means a country that the United States is actually at war with, militarily, by providing aid and comfort to the other side that aides them in waging war with the U.S. Cooperating with Russian election interference isn't treason. Inaction isn't treason. The President probably has an absolute legal right to disclose information that is classified for national security purposes. The President is immune from civil and criminal liability for his official acts while he is President. If the President, from his private funds, and not as part of his officially duties, personally paid Taliban soldiers bounties to shoot and kill American soldiers, that might be treason (since the U.S. is at war, within the meaning of the treason statute, with the Taliban). Cooperating with Russia, despite the fact that it has done so is not treason. Even then, federal prosecutors would not press these federal charges against the President while the President was in office. And, the President would be immune, in all probability, to state treason charges for conduct while in office. So the President would have to be prosecuted after leaving office. On the other hand, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment does not require a criminal conviction to be effective. The intent of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was to deny civil rights in the post-Civil War governments of the United States by Confederate officials and military officers. In practice, Congress used the authority it was granted to remove political disabilities from all but about 500 of the hundreds of thousands or millions of people eligible for this treatment under the 14th Amendment. Couldn't this happen even if a Republican controlled senate decided not to remove him from office after being impeached? That is, even if it wouldn't cause him to be removed from office, couldn't he, separate from impeachment, be convicted of a crime while still holding office? The federal government prosecutes treason. Ultimately, the President is the one who decides whom the federal government prosecutes. So, the President as a practical matter could not be convicted of treason while still holding office, even if he committed acts which actually constitute treason, unlike anything could be plausibly alleged in this case. If he was found convicted of a crime which fit the above bolded passage (and didn't engage in some shenanigans like pardoning himself), who would keep him from taking office? (i.e. enforce the law). A future President can pardon the crime of treason by a former President. Ford pardoned Nixon of crimes that Nixon committed, and many Presidents have pardoned treason convictions at times close to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and to the adoption of the 14th Amendment. But this just can't come up in this case. You'd need a treason to have been committed before someone was elected.
It is quite likely that a constitutional amendment was (and is) not needed to ban alcohol. For example, if the Controlled Substances Act is constitutional (and I have no reason to believe it isn't) then alcohol could be added to it tomorrow and it could be removed the day after tomorrow. Right there is the reason that you choose to use a constitutional amendment - it is as hard to reverse as it was to enact; it needs another constitutional ammendment.
Note the following argument: the landmark 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland, which ruled that state officials cannot obstruct “the measures of a government [the federal government] created by others as well as themselves.” “In other words,” Kalt and Amar summarize, “a single state cannot use its power to derail the functioning of the United States.” (Amar is a Yale constitutional law professor, Kalt, his student) On the other hand, you have the argument by a Hofstra constitutional law professor that the 25th amendment can be applied when the President is occupied with a criminal case, ergo, the functioning of the United States can be carried on unimpared. At the end-of-the-day there is no absolute answer as it is still being argued academically and has never been specifically settled by the courts.
First of all, there is a distinction between being impeached and being convicted. Trump was impeached when the House voted to adopt an Article of Impeachment. That happened while he was still in office. He will not be convicted until the Senate votes to convict him by a 2/3rds vote, if it ever does. In the case of Nixon, the House had not yet voted to adopt Articles of Impeachment when he resigned. They had been introduced and debated, but not yet finally approved. Moreover, we don't know what would have happened if the House had proceeded to pass such articles after Nixon had resigned. The House of that time did not choose to proceed. There was no court ruling saying that they could not do so. There are some precedents saying that the Senate can proceed with a trial after an official resigns or is expelled after impeachment. None of these are at all recent, none are clear cut, none involved an official whose term had ended, none involved a President, and none that I am aware of led to a conviction. And this issue has never been tested in a Federal court. Specifically, there is the case of William Belknap. Belknap was Secretary of War under US President Grant. He was accused of improperly profiting from military contracts. The House started impeachment proceedings. Grant interviewed Belknap, who confessed to Grant and resigned on the spot. The house none the less pass five articles of impeachment after Belknap resigned. When the Senate took up the case, there was a motion to dismiss on the ground that the Senate did not have jurisdiction because of Belknap's resignation. By a vote of 37–29 the Senate held that it had jurisdiction and that a trial should proceed. The vote to convict Belknap was 35 for conviction, 25 against it. This was five votes short of the required 2/3rds to convict. Most of the Senators voting against conviction were on record as doing so because they did not agree that the Senate had jurisdiction. Thus a majority vote of the Senate held in that case that such a trial was proper, but less than 2/3rds. (Most also indicted that they thought the charges true.) There was also the case of William Blount. Blount, a Senator, was impeached by the House in 1798. (In fact this was the first impeachment ever under the US Constitution.) The Senate voted to expel him. When the articles of impeachment came up in 1799, the Senate voted to dismiss the impeachment, on the ground that the impeachment process did not extend to members of the Senate, but not on the grounds that the expulsion rendered the proceedings moot. Should Trump be convicted by the Senate (which now seems unlikely) he might bring a court case claiming that such a conviction was unconstitutional. There is no knowing how a court would handle such a case. And if Trump is not convicted, no such case will be brought this time, either. This Washington Post opinion piece by two Constitutional scholars claims that such a trial would be constitutionally proper. It also claims that it would not have been proper had the vote to adopt articles of impeachment occurred after Trump had left office. Others have taken different positions. Whether a Senate trial of an impeachment is constitutional after the person impeached has left office is a hotly debated question at the moment. There has never been a court ruling on the point, and neither of the precedents is of a situation quite matching the current impeachment of Trump. No court has ruled on the matter. The Senate did not vote for a motion to dismiss the impeachment on those grounds, although if every senator who voted for the motion voted to acquit, Trump would not be convicted. From the comments I wish that any downvoters would leave a comment indicting what thy think is wring with this answer. In the absence of a comment, I cannot improve the answer, others cannot use the reasons to write better answers, and readers have no idea why someone objects to the answer. Such a downvote seems pointless. I have updated this answer with a discussion of the Blount and Belknap precedents. In neither case did the Senate actually vote to dismiss the articles because the accused was no longer in office, although that seems to be a major reason why 25 senators voted against convicting Belknap.