#I also reject the thiel comparison

[tanadrin]

What if the judicial safeguards are an important tool of consensus building and coordinating political action to prevent someone like Trump winning the presidency? Like I think laws and institutions and norms have a complicated backreaction with other kinds of political activity—in practice, a society with strong legal rules supporting democracy is probably going to find it easier to coordinate politics activity against authoritarianism than one without those rules, all else being equal.

@jadagul also the problem I have with the framing "the law requires disqualifying Trump but the law is bad" is, like

okay, the law should be interpreted consistently, right? And as a matter of policy it seems not bad to have a law saying that, in general terms, people who want to end constitutional government can't hold office under the constitution (though Congress has discretion to let them anyway)

which is why Congress (and the states) ratified the 14th amendment in the first place.

so we are left saying that either the original policy was bad (seems dubious to me, I'm a big fan of the rule of law) or that because he is uniquely popular the law is uniquely bad in the case of Trump, which seems like a complicated way of saying Trump should be excused from this law. and that's really bad, because then it means Trump is above the law!

but there is a political solution in Congress if there really is a strong democratic will to let Trump run: he can get excused by a two-thirds vote of both houses! so we could easily reverse the political problem and say to Trump supporters, hey, it's your job to convince a supermajority of the House and Senate to clear the guy.

and maybe you can say "oh but reconstruction was a different time, the law shouldn't have stayed on the books," but then the time to repeal it was any point since the 1870s.

it is reasonable to me that democratic systems put robust safeguards of many different kinds in place to protect democracy, and if those safeguards exist they ought to be used. otherwise you get systems like in authoritarian republics where the constitution makes lots of flowery guarantees that don't mean anything, because the judiciary isn't empowered to rule on any issue of consequence or wade into any issue where there is political disagreement.