Vivisecting Section 3

I'm still kind of dubious about the magical qualities of the 14th Amendment Section 3, as I was back in September, but I should add that I'm a lot more impressed than I was expecting to be by the case Colorado's Supreme Court makes for reversing the original district court ruling, which had concluded that Donald Trump did indeed "engage in" an "insurrection" against the United States, but 14/3 didn't apply to him, because as president he was not an "officer under the United States", as the Amendment specifies:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

The president isn't an officer? Even though he holds the Office of the presidency and swears to execute the Office faithfully when he is inaugurated and can be removed from Office if he's impeached and convicted? Not to get all originalist on you, but that's what "officer" meant in the 18th century, what we more often call an official, somebody who holds an office in an organization, and of course the president of the United States is one. Imagine a law that removes all the other officers, in Congress or the judiciary or the civil service, it they've taken part in a rebellion against the government, but doesn't disqualify the big cheese? That won't let Lieutenant Henry Numbnuts of the former Confederate Army serve as a section head in a customs office, but it's OK for Jefferson Davis to be president? No.

And so the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that, unsurprisingly, but there was no reason to mess with the main part of the decision, which was very solid, and it's intact in the new ruling. Unless you were working on such a tight deadline that you didn't have time to read it, as apparently happened to Jonathan Chait:

Are you there, God? It's me, Ross.

Via St. Thomas More Catholic Church and Parish School, Houston, a St. Thomas that actually looks a little like Ross Douthat.

Or maybe the Blessed Virgin, but definitely requesting a miracle ("Why Not Mike Pence?"):

DOUTHAT: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, amen. And soften the hearts of the Republican caucus in the House, and let them impeach the Trump, for that is seriously a good idea to make Pence president before the midterms, if you can swing it. If they'd managed to convict Bill Clinton in 1998, see, and Gore had been president going into the 2000 election, he would have won, and...

B.V.M.: He did win. St. Thomas More intervened to stop the recount. I told him to leave it alone, but that man never listens to anybody.

DOUTHAT: Oh, yeah, well... Pence probably needs a bigger miracle than Bush did, because he has to get nominated in the first place.

So that's the general idea: there's old Pence, the exact sort of guy all those white evangelical men of virtue think of themselves as being, bland as a boiled potato and as fanatical under the blandness as his talk radio background could make him, positioned to become president without even having to go to the trouble of getting elected, if only the Republicans could make up their minds to do it.

The interesting part is that Douthat, the smartest of our rightwing columnists, as I've always said, though not the least dishonest, seems to have become the first to broach the possibility that the orange asshat could be guilty of something; putting it with the most extreme delicacy—