Constitutional Framers here. We’re just sending a little missive to clear up some confusion. We hear there’s been a bit of hullabaloo regarding the precise meaning of the words our colleagues and we labored over about eight score years ago. We’re here to clarify that we indeed meant what we fucking said.
Some of you are suggesting that when we wrote that someone who previously took an oath “as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States” but “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” cannot be president, perhaps we meant something other than the literal fucking meaning of those words.
We can understand the confusion. Sometimes, people’s words are the opposite of what they mean, as when using sarcasm or engaging in a bit of satire. I can assure you that we were not employing such literary devices when we drafted the goddamn Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
It may be surprising for you to hear, but we actually took our task—which, again, was writing an amendment to the document that serves as the supreme law of the whole frigging country—rather seriously. We held long debates to align our intent, we checked our spelling and grammar, and you can bet your ass we wordsmithed the shit out of it.
Incidentally, we’re proud of the end result. It was written soon after a rather difficult time for our nation—you may have read about the War of Rebellion (or perhaps you haven’t; we hear your history textbooks are somewhat lacking in this area). As you might imagine, not everyone was enamored of this amendment when we wrote it. And yet… this is the amendment that was fucking ratified on July 9, 1868.
Sorry if we sound peevish. It’s because we underwent much hardship to arrive at these carefully chosen words—did you know that more than seventy proposals for an amendment were drafted? Seventy! That’s a lot of fucking parchment!
Frankly, it’s a source of extreme vexation to still be encountering this kind of fuckery when our intent couldn’t be any fucking clearer. Should insurrectionists be disqualified from the highest office in the land? Absofuckinglutely.