The Colorado Supreme Court will hear argument next week in the Trump eligibility challenge. Here are some new materials that I've found in my research that might be of interest to our readers:
1. State v. Lewis, 22 La. 33 (1870) (upholding the removal of a state judge pursuant to Section Three). The judge was a state legislator in Georgia before the Civil War and served in the Confederate Army. He moved to Louisiana after the war and became a parish judge, but he did not receive amnesty. Neither I nor anyone else noticed this decision until recently, in part because it is brief.
2. The Daily Journal (Montpelier, VT), Oct. 19, 1868 (explaining the Fourteenth Amendment to its readers). "The third article of the fourteenth amendment excludes leading rebels from holding offices in the Nation and the State, from the Presidency downward, until Congress, by a two-thirds vote of each branch, shall have removed the disability."
There are many newspaper articles from this era the say the same thing. At some point I'll list them all.
3. At least one member of the Supreme Court (Lucius Q.C. Lamar of Mississippi) needed amnesty to hold his seat. John Bingham himself introduced Lamar's amnesty petition in the House in 1872. (Lamar joined the Court in the 1880s). Justice Howell Jackson of Georgia, who served for a few years in the 1890s, was given amnesty by the general statute in 1872.
4. I highly recommend Sherillyn Ifill's op-ed in The Washington Post from the other day.