On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court shocked just about everyone when it announced that Donald Trump’s name is ineligible to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot.
The ruling came as a result of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause”—a clause the justices say Trump thumbed his nose at when he “engaged in insurrection” on January 6, 2021.
While the Colorado GOP is threatening all sorts of chaos should the court’s decision stand, Seth Meyers seemed oddly nonplussed by the situation Wednesday night—probably because, from a purely logical standpoint, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising.
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“So Trump is now ineligible to run for president in Colorado on the basis of the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists,” Meyers began on Wednesday.
He then assured viewers that if they weren’t familiar with the language of this amendment, “you’re not alone. It’s a Reconstruction-era amendment which high-school history classes always skip over.”
So Meyers offered a short history lesson: “After the Civil War, Congress ratified the section of the 14th Amendment in order to keep secessionists who were disloyal to the United States out of government.”
The reason why, Meyers explained, is because “much like Trump supporters today, Southern states were just immediately sending unrepentant secessionists back to Congress like nothing had happened.” In other words, according to Meyers, “they basically pulled a George Costanza trying to show up to work after he quit.”
How, exactly, does that relate to Trump today? “Let’s just think for a second: an unrepentant insurrectionist who tried to overthrow American democracy lost, and is trying to weasel his way back into power like nothing happened,” Meyers said. “Does that sound like anyone we know?”
“The only way this amendment could apply more to Donald Trump is if it said: ‘No person shall hold any office who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, including any flamboyant land-owning weirdos whose ties are too long and won’t stop complaining about toilets that don’t flush and windmills killing birds.”
Meyers says that he doesn’t “think anyone can reasonably dispute the fact that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist as defined by the plain text of the amendment.”
