Nora O’Donnell, anchor of the CBS Evening News, says there is nothing in the Constitution that says a felon can’t be President. She’s right. I can’t find it anywhere in my copy.
There is also nothing in the Constitution that says you can’t steal an election by falsifying business records and paying a porn star to stay quiet before Election Day. I guess you can go ahead and do that too, no problem. Our Founding Fathers didn’t worry enough about it to put it in the Constitution.
On the other hand, what if the people of New York state stand up and say, no you can’t do that without penalty in our state. That kind of stuff is illegal. What then, Ms. O’Donnell? When the people in a democracy speak up and decide their own laws and judgments in the present day, maybe that means the Constitution doesn’t have all the answers to all of life’s questions. Maybe it is just fine to penalize the actual, documented business acts that led to the theft of a real election like the one in 2016. And maybe it is just fine to legally filter out felons who do stuff like that from holding public office in the future. Every other democracy in the history of the world applied that filter, so why shouldn’t we?