Jamelle Bouie YES it was an insurrection - the amicus briefs

Yes - it was an insurrection - see the amicus briefs - Jamelle Bouie New York Times

By Jamelle Bouie

While we await oral argument in Trump v. Anderson — the U.S. Supreme Court case that will evaluate the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to exclude the former president from the state’s Republican primary ballot — it’s worth revisiting the arguments leveled against the Colorado court’s decision and, by extension, its interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The first and most important one is that the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol, was not an insurrection. Related to this is the argument that even if Jan. 6 was an insurrection, it’s still not clear that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. As Jonathan Chait put it in New York magazine, “And while the violent mob storming the Capitol was certainly engaging in insurrection, Trump kept just enough distance from it — goading the crowd beforehand, refusing to call it off, but not directing its actions — to create a sliver of ambiguity as to whether he personally engaged in insurrection.”

I’ve argued, relying on evidence drawn from an amicus brief to the Colorado Supreme Court, that the former president’s actions make him an insurrectionist by any reasonable definition of the term and certainly as it was envisioned by the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who experienced insurrection firsthand. If that isn’t persuasive, consider the evidence marshaled by the legal scholars Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar in a more recent amicus brief. They argue that top of mind for the drafters of the 14th Amendment were the actions of John B. Floyd, the secretary of war during the secession crisis of November 1860 to March 1861.**