‘The Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution — not to ‘support’ the Constitution,’ read a filing from the former president’s attorneys
The intention is that it’s a step beyond the oath of support, having just dug around in law articles and history on it.
And reading the article, it sounds like the only one making a semantical argument, is Trump and his lawyers.
The problem is that the current Supreme Court clearly would support throwing that out, and they LOVE semantics like that to justify clearly bullshit decisions.
If interpreting laws is going to just turn into how much money a wealthy individual (or anyone wealthy enough to foot the bill) can argue the semantics of anything … what good and what use is any law?
Imprisoning poor people.
They also like using history to support their decisions. If it can be shown that the presidential oath is intended to go beyond “support” I would see the court being persuaded that “support” is implied by “protect, preserve, and defend”. It depends on whether the textualists or the pseudo-historians win the day.
The five conservative “justices” are conservatives first and “justices” second. They will always rule however the standard, bigoted, Fox-News-loving white nationalist will rule. They do this by using wordplay and bad-faith semantics.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either deception or manipulation. Every word.