This decision betrays the fundamental purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause and gives a pass to political violence as a tool for disrupting and overturning free and fair elections.

To be sure, the judge agreed with the challengers on the appropriate legal standard for determining whether someone has “engaged” in insurrection, including that “marching orders or instructions to capture a particular objective, or to disrupt or obstruct a particular government proceeding,” constitute engagement. And he rejected virtually all of Greene’s legal arguments, e.g., that speech cannot constitute engagement, or that a prior criminal conviction is necessary to trigger disqualification. Nor did he accept her arguments that the January 6, 2021 attack wasn’t an insurrection, or that the insurrectionists are sheltered by an 1872 congressional amnesty for ex-Confederates. Instead, he based his ruling on supposedly insufficient evidence–in large part, credulously accepting her repeated denials or lack of recollection. He discounted both her pre-January announcement of a plan to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and her January 5 signal (“This is our 1776 moment”) that the violent vanguard understood as a green light.

The purpose of the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause–in 1866 and today–is to protect the republic not just (or even mainly) from violent foot soldiers, but rather the political leaders who broke their oath to support the Constitution and helped facilitate the insurrection. It’s true that Greene didn’t attack police officers herself, but in the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis never fired a shot. The case law under the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause is clear that any voluntary assistance to an insurrection is disqualifying, and the evidence presented in this case established beyond serious question that Greene helped facilitate an assemblage of violent extremists for the purpose, as she admitted on video, of preventing the peaceful transfer of power.

We urge Secretary Raffensperger to take a fresh look at the evidence presented in the case and reject the judge’s recommendation. Marjorie Taylor Greene helped facilitate the January 6 insurrection, and under the Constitution, she is disqualified from future office.