Nora O’Donnell, anchor of the CBS Evening News, says there is nothing in the Constitution that says a felon can’t be President. She’s right. I can’t find it anywhere in my copy.
There is also nothing in the Constitution that says you can’t steal an election by falsifying business records and paying a porn star to stay quiet before Election Day. I guess you can go ahead and do that too, no problem. Our Founding Fathers didn’t worry enough about it to put it in the Constitution.
On the other hand, what if the people of New York state stand up and say, no you can’t do that without penalty in our state. That kind of stuff is illegal. What then, Ms. O’Donnell? When the people in a democracy speak up and decide their own laws and judgments in the present day, maybe that means the Constitution doesn’t have all the answers to all of life’s questions. Maybe it is just fine to penalize the actual, documented business acts that led to the theft of a real election like the one in 2016. And maybe it is just fine to legally filter out felons who do stuff like that from holding public office in the future. Every other democracy in the history of the world applied that filter, so why shouldn’t we?
Ancient democratic Athens and Rome, the nations we used as examples for our own democracy, ushered politician felons out of town and out of the country and didn’t let them come back. They were exiled, with or without expropriation of their personal property. Why? Because the people cared enough about democracy to protect it from ignorant, violent usurpers of legitimate law and power. And what, pray tell, does that make us today? It makes us little tiny wusses compared to them, it would seem.
Nothing in the Constitution says you can’t cause an insurrection inside the halls of Congress, or you can’t steal classified documents, or you can’t conspire to overturn state election returns. So, maybe it is okay to be indicted for all that and still allow a man to run for public office. Apparently so, because we are about to elect Donald Trump as President of the United States, after he did all that right under our noses.
What I’m getting at here is that the Constitution is not a criminal justice document telling us what to do in every case of misbehavior. It is a document that defines how we carry out the legitimate processes of government. The Constitution says it is okay with whatever the people decide to do with felons as long as they decide it democratically.
America can bar Donald Trump and any and all other felons from running for and serving in office if she darn well feels like it. And we should have been preparing and passing state and federal legislation to that effect for the past couple years anticipating the very situation we are in today.
So, Ms. O’Donnell, if the people decide there will still be plenty of law-abiding candidates for office left over after we bar access to public office to felons, then we are free to do just that. We can do that even when the Democratic party boss Joe Biden wants Donald Trump on the ballot for his own selfish personal purposes.
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of a constitutional history of the executive branch of the U.S. government, titled “The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama,” 2014.