What history says about the insurrection clause and Trump

Plus: The surprisingly equal history of polyamory |

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By Made by History / Produced by Olivia B. Waxman Does the 14th Amendment disqualify Donald Trump from running for president again because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection? That’s the question courts are grappling with in several states. And there isn’t an unambiguous answer. But this is a place where history helps, argues Elizabeth Varon in Made by History. It provides a lens into what the people who wrote the amendment thought. In the spring of 1868, even before ratification was complete, Congress staged a debate over whether to remove the barrier to holding office for scores of Confederates, most importantly Gen. James Longstreet. The focus of the debate was over repentance, and whether the Confederates in question had sufficiently repented for their sins and displayed enough newfound loyalty to the Union to deserve to hold office again. The debate suggests, Varon argues, that Trump’s lack of repentance and the way in which he continues to foment division makes him the sort of person that the drafters of the 14th Amendment sought to disqualify from holding future office. Click here to read the full story.

HISTORY ON TIME.COM Government Shutdowns Were Never Necessary Anyway By M.A. Davis / Made by History Government shutdowns only became possible in 1980, when the Attorney General offered a new interpretation of an 1870 law. Read More » What Civil War History Says About Attempts to Use the Insurrection Clause to Keep Trump From Office By Elizabeth R. Varon / Made by History Debates about handling Confederates reveal that the 14th Amendment bars unrepentant insurrectionists from office. Read More » How Christianity Influenced America's Notions of Equality By Darrin M. McMahon "'All men are created equal' coexisted comfortably with the understanding that not all were meant to be treated equally in life," writes Darrin McMahon. Read More » The Surprising Political Evolution of American Polyamory By Christopher M. Gleason / Made by History In the long history of American sexual dissent, the relationship between politics and sexual freedom defies simplistic categorization. Read More » What Sparta and Athens Can Teach the Modern World About War By Matthew A. Sears / Made by History Democracy is also no safeguard against a propensity to go to war. Read More » The Lesson of Denmark’s Unparalleled Effort to Save Its Jewish Population During World War II By Therkel Straede At the height of World War Two, Denmark dramatically saved the vast majority of its Jewish population from the Nazis Read More »

FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1980: Ronald Reagan Michael Evans The Nov. 17, 1980, cover of TIME “In a savage repudiation of a sitting President not seen since F.D.R. swept away Herbert Hoover in the midst of the Great Depression, Americans chose Ronald Wilson Reagan, at 69 the oldest man ever to be elected President, to replace Jimmy Carter in the White House…Once the big count began, all the shibboleths of the election—that Americans were confused, apathetic and wished a plague on all the candidates and, above all, that they were closely divided—were swept away by a rising tide of votes, some hopeful, many angry, that carried Reagan to victory in one of the most astonishing political and personal triumphs in the nation's history.” Read More » This week in 2008: Barack Obama TIME The Nov. 17, 2008, cover of TIME “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope…As he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began…Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.” Read More » This week in 2010: John Boehner PHOTOGRAPH BY BROOKS KRAFT FOR TIME The Nov. 15, 2010, cover of TIME “You can tell a lot about a man from his tears, and House Speaker-to-be John Boehner has always been a weeper. He cried on the House floor while defending the Wall Street bailout and once choked up during a partisan speech accusing Democrats of abandoning the troops in Iraq. But he also used to bawl every year during the fundraisers he co-chaired with his friend Ted Kennedy for cash-strapped Catholic schools. ‘John's got the biggest heart in the House,’ says Republican conference boss Mike Pence, who lost a leadership election to Boehner in 2006. ‘My preacher used to say, 'When the eyes leak, the head won't swell.'" Read More »

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