Answering The Huge Question

THE EMERGING QUESTION OF THE DAY, a question which will continue to emerge and trash about throughout the circuitous corriders of American political and legal life until finally being laid to rest by being definitively resolved,is: Considering the fact that Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the American government by planning, orchestrating, and leading a violent insurrection against it, does the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. constitution prohibit him from running for president in 2024 and, if elected,from serving? The question, a totally terrific huge one, as Trump might say under different circumstances, becomes more seemingly relevant by the day as blue states move to pass legislation keeping him off the ballot in 2024. All across America's fruited plain, from the hallowed halls of Harvard to those of Stanford and Cal Tech, from Wall Street to Main Street,legal scholars, politicians, right wing blue collar evangelical Christian experts on God's political will and everything else, and ordinary citizens, if there are any remaining, are talking, arguing,and giving screeching sermons about it. Many more will soon follow. They needn't bother. All the sound and fury is premature, signifying nothing, and thus irrelevant, at least for the time being. The answer is staring us all straight in the face, as plainly obvious as a colosseum full of screaming teenagers and baby boomers pointing their smart phones at the scantily clad, gyrating Taylor Swift. And the short anwer is: It does not, now, but will, but if and only if trump is actually convicted of incitement to insurrection, a crime with which he has been charged, along with ninety other felonious crimes, but has not yet stood trial nor been convicted of. Its that glaringly simple, despite all our encroaching disputatious but still irrelevant chitter chatter about it. Innocent until proven guilty stll applies, even to and especially to Donald J.Trump, notwithstanding the fact that many of whose crimes are recorded on audio and video, stored away safely,several of which I personally witnessed in living color on national TV, along with millions of other Americans. As former Trump Attorney General and flunky Bill Barr eloquently articulated: "If even half of it is true, he's toast." True enough, but toast or no toast, if and only if convicted of insurrection, Trump cannot run nor serve, but until he is so conviced thereof, he can. Hell, as everybody not inhabiting on Mars knows by now, Don the alleged Con could and might well run for president from prison, serive therefrom, retire therefrom, and spend his post presidential retirement in lock up, rather than the customary book writing and speech making circuit, which would doubtless be his first choice, seeing as how Der Trumpmeister has a well known proclivity for seeking and grabbing attention, by whatever means are available.There are precisely ninety crimes with which the future defendant is currently charged which if convicted of would not prevent him from running for and serving as president, even from prison; the lone exception is incitement to insurrection. And that, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story.