Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Americans died in the Civil War, so leaders “who engaged in insurrection” like the Colorado Supreme Court found former President Donald Trump did, can not run for office.

Weissmann said, “So this is not new. It is true that this provision of the Constitution is new to lots of people because we’ve never been in a situation where you would have somebody running for office who engaged in insurrection or a rebellion. What’s remarkable to me is that the story isn’t the — really, the unanimous finding in the Colorado case because you had no one dissenting on the issue of did he do it.”

Weissmann added “No one was saying, oh, no, this was insufficient proof. There were lots of procedural issues, and I don’t mean to minimize them, that the dissent raised, but there was a district court finding and there was a majority opinion with no dissents on the fact that the leading contender for the Republican nomination had done what we had a civil war about. And the reason for this amendment was because after the Civil War, people said, if you have engaged in this kind of conduct you cannot be any longer the president, the vice president, or any federal position.”

“So this is historically really important in terms of what many people died for in this country. And it’s just not a terribly smart approach to pander to that kind of speculation and foment that kind of thinking, instead of talking about the real issues in the case. There really are significant issues that the Supreme Court will have to address. It is — one of them is not the speculation about isn’t the Biden Administration doing this to sort of engage in civil unrest, which was very much what people said Donald Trump was doing.”

How would you respond to Weissmann on this?

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