Jack Albrecht
2 min readJan 8, 2024

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Historically is a key factor here. A court conviction was not necessary if you were a registered member of the armed forces /government that seceded from the US and then fought against it. The amendment was specifically made to deal with the situation after the civil war, and has never (to the best of my knowledge) ever been used since (and not even consistently then).

In 2024, this is "really friggin' easy" as the law very often is. You ran a stop light on camera? You get a ticket.

The medium example is specifically relevant because it not a court of law, but Medium's terms of service (TOS) are legally binding for users. Your last sentence is a non sequitur. The point was (in my hypothetical) that you are being barred from using Medium. If your goal was to post on Medium, you would go to court and say that you have neither been charged nor convicted of rape (at least, that is my assumption...;-) JOKE!) and therefore you have not broken the TOS and cannot be barred from posting on Medium for that reason.

That is exactly what I expect the Supreme Court will rule: Trump has neither been charged nor convicted of insurrection therefore it is not legal to bar him on those grounds.

This doesn't make me a Trump supporter. It makes me a supporter of the rule of law. Having a huge number of people say you did something does NOT make you guilty of doing that something. The US legal system is far from perfect but FFS our elections shouldn't be based on partisan name calling.

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Jack Albrecht
Jack Albrecht

Written by Jack Albrecht

US expatriate living in the EU; seeing the world from both sides of the Atlantic.

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