Pwnallthethings lampoons 14th Amendment punditry
I’m ripping this off wholesale for the reading enjoyment of those not on Blue Sky.
First replace Trump with Obama and the 14th Amendment with the 22nd, says Pwnallthethings:
Now do it everywhere:
If you know, you know:
Naturally The Wall Street Journal gets in on the act:
One Connor Lynch comments: These rewrites really capture the solipsistic pedantry of the highly implausible counter arguments that keep popping up in editorial pages.
Pwnallthethings replies:
It’s fun applying their “ah, yes, the constitution says X, but they mean X in a special secret way that only I with this decoder triangle can parse for you” logic to similarly basic provisions elsewhere
When the 22nd Amendment says “elected only twice” the etymology of the latin prefix “bi” means “two”, but “biannual” might mean every two years, or twice per year, up to a total amount of four, and for that reason, “twice” here should be understood to permit “three”, a number less than “four” …
Imagine the remaining dialogue read as a Monty Python skit:
Connor Lynch: The 22nd Amendment’s use of “shall” here is not a mandate for courts and legislatures but merely predictive. It is guidance for voters, its enforcement and interpretation left exclusively to them.
Pwnallthethings: While the 22nd Amendment says that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”, it is not clear that the Presidency is an office at all; and consequently nobody has ever been elected president even once, and Obama can be elected a third time. In this essay I shall
Connor Lynch: “The 22nd amendment isn’t self-executing” would be a fun one. Being elected three times isn’t a crime, so it must be permitted
Pwnallthethings: No jury has convicted president Obama of having held two terms, nor has any prosecutor indicted him for it. Consequently denying him the ballot on 22nd Amendment grounds would be a gross violation of both his and our due process rights. As Professor of Law for the University of Tesla, I will show
And so on.
Real pundits get paid to write this. Remember that.
Update:
