Colorado Judge: Trump is an insurrectionist, but may still hold public office.

A Colorado judge presiding over the question of Donald Trump’s eligibility for public office recently made a particularly strange ruling—after declaring that Trump is legally and literally an insurrectionist, she found that the Constitutional amendment forbidding insurrectionists from holding public office doesn’t apply to Presidents of the United States.

Colorado District Judge Sarah Wallace’s decision relied on tortured logic in the estimation of not merely progressive commentators, but even conservative Constitutional scholars like J. Michael Luttig, who regarded the ruling as “unfathomable.”

At the center of the Constitutional question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, one of many Reconstruction amendments ratified in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Section 3 prohibits those who had previously sworn an oath to support the Constitution from ever holding public office after committing insurrection against it.

Wallace bluntly confirmed that Trump is an insurrectionist—itself an extraordinary statement, the first time a United States court has designated the former president as such—but found that Section 3 did not apply to him because the presidential oath is not to “support” the Constitution, but to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.

She also appealed to the fact that the president is not one of the explicitly listed public offices that the Amendment mentions, perplexing Luttig and his progressive counterpart Laurence Tribe.

“Judge Wallace held that anyone but a former president who did what she found Trump did — take an oath to the Constitution and then break that oath by engaging in a violent insurrection — could never again run for any public office,” Tribe Tweeted, “so much for nobody being above the law!”

The watchdog group responsible for filing the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, took the ruling in stride. Finding solace in the fact that Trump has officially been deemed an insurrectionist by a court of law, CREW declared they are appealing the decision to the Colorado state Supreme Court.