Friday, August 04, 2023

For the Record: Fan Fiction

 Relief crew here, hi folks!


Illustration via Haley Zapal.


Weird debate on the platform formerly known as Twitter, now going by the glyph I pronounce as "My X" ("I'm still living with my X..."), taking off from Steve's post and comments yesterday on the issue of whether to use the 14th Amendment's Disqualification of Public Office provision to knock Trump's name off the ballot:

Looked to me like he hadn't bothered to read the post, which wasn't about the procedural details. But for some reason he had read a sentence from my comment ("Unless he's actually been convicted it isn't even constitutional"):

BTW states don't have "congresses".

At this point I finally realized what I was dealing with was fan fiction. He wasn't actually interested in the question of how the 14th Amendment works, he was interested in pushing the story around into alternative realities. But I think the argument itself is kind of interesting, as clarifying how the amendment was intended in the first place and how weird it would be to try applying it now, and I didn't want it to go to waste.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

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