Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Imprudence of Originalism

Ius & Iustitium welcomes submissions from academics, practicing lawyers, and students interested in the classical legal tradition. The author is a recent federal judicial law clerk.

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I.

Events of the last month provide a case study in the question of how originalists relate legal theory to legal practice. On August 10, originalist law professor and Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi uploaded a post to the group law blog The Volokh Conspiracy arguing that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment automatically disqualifies Donald Trump from running for president in 2024.^[1] This post, it turned out, was a pre-endorsement of a forthcoming law review article, 126 single-spaced pages in length, uploaded to SSRN on August 14 by prominent originalists Will Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen.^[2] The relevant constitutional text runs as follows:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.^[3]

Baude and Paulsen argue that: (1) This prohibition is self-executing, meaning that state officials are free to remove a candidate from the ballot without waiting for congressional legislation to specify how the prohibition will be implemented.^[4] (2) The prohibition is not limited by any other constitutional provision such as the due process or free speech clauses, meaning that state officials are free to remove a candidate who has not been convicted of any crime, purely on the basis of constitutionally protected speech.^[5] (3) Although “insurrection,” “rebellion,” and giving “aid or comfort” to “enemies” are words that admit of a range of interpretations, a court cannot enjoin a state official’s actions so long as those actions are at least plausibly in accord with these terms’ meaning.^[6] (4) The phrase “officer of the United States,” and so the prohibition itself, applies to the President of the United States.^[7] (5) Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 engaged in conduct which at least plausibly qualifies as “insurrection,” “rebellion,” and giving “aid or comfort” to “enemies.”^[8] Putting these together, Baude and Paulsen conclude that a court could not reverse the actions of a state official who removed Trump from the 2024 ballot.

Much debate ensued in the lawblogosphere, in the popular press, and, on September 12, on SSRN itself, where two more originalists, Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman, uploaded their own 126-page draft article attacking Baude and Paulsen’s reasoning point-by-point.^[9] That same day, in an apparent coincidence, the Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor from Calabresi announcing that he had changed his mind: Trump was not subject to disability after all.^[10]

It is unsurprising that originalists would disagree among themselves about Section Three’s original meaning and so contemporary application. The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted 155 years ago, in the wake of the Civil War. There would have been no doubt, at the time, that fighting for the Confederacy or serving in its government were acts of insurrection or rebellion. The trickier questions of when a riot becomes an insurrection, and of whose job it is to say, was not at the forefront of anyone’s mind. Moreover, until the events of January 6 revived the issue, only a handful of antique judicial opinions had ever endeavored to interpret Section Three. There had been no need, not only because the Civil War was the last major insurrection, but also because, four years after the amendment’s ratification, Congress exercised its power to remove the disability in question even from the vast majority of those Confederates to whom it had first applied.^[11]

Given the dearth of direct evidence of original meaning, the question of the proper application of Section Three is of the sort to which originalism struggles to give a clear answer—and, accordingly, with which its ivory-tower proponents most love to engage. What is the legal meaning of ‘‘insurrection’, ‘rebellion’, ‘aid or comfort’? Of ‘officer of the United States’? The positivist originalist sees these as questions of fact, to be ascertained through empirical research into historical linguistics. The more murky the evidence appears at first glance, the more impressive the researcher’s ability to reach clear conclusions. Is Section Three self-executing? Is its meaning constrained by other constitutional provisions? These questions are structural rather than textual, but for the positivist originalist they, too, ultimately come down to facts. They should be answered by ascertaining the background law in 1868 and then determining how the amendment fits into it, a task akin to determining how a new part will alter the operation of an old machine.^[12]

And what about the facts that Donald Trump has been convicted of no crime; that the impeachment efforts against him failed; that his purportedly insurrectionary actions may be constitutionally protected speech; and that a sizable plurality of the country remains ready to vote for him for a second term? Given these circumstances, what effect would it have on the body politic for a state official to remove Trump from the ballot unilaterally and without serious prospect of judicial review? Baude and Paulsen insist that such questions are irrelevant: “Taking Section Three seriously, as binding constitutional law, means faithfully ascertaining and fearlessly applying the objective, original meaning of its words and phrases, understood in their historical context, whether we like that meaning or not, and tirelessly following the logic of the text’s meaning to its fair conclusions.”^[13]

II

Remarkably, however, the best contemporary source for the original legal meaning of Section Three adopts an entirely different approach to the interpretation of law—one much closer to that advocated by Ius & Iustitium contributors. Griffin’s Case^[14] concerned a black man convicted of murder in an indisputably fair trial presided over by a judge who had served in Confederate government. The murderer sought habeas relief on the grounds that his trial was unlawful, the presiding judge having been automatically removed from office upon passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court granted habeas, and the state appealed. Chief Justice Salmon Chase, in his capacity as Circuit Justice, concluded that habeas relief was not warranted because the relevant provisions were not self-executing—insurrectionists could remain in office until Congress enacted implementing legislation. Such legislation regarding officials in the state of Virginia was enacted after Griffin’s conviction but before Chase’s decision, a fact Chase cites as “strong confirmation” of his interpretation.^[15]

Baude and Paulsen’s argument for self-execution is in large part an attack on Chase’s opinion. They accuse him of the gravest jurisprudential sins in the originalist bible. Attention to consequences:

Chase’s opinion imposed, as a solution to textual literalism and its real and imagined policy inconveniences, a different kind of constitutional provision … Put bluntly, Chase made up law that was not there in order to change law that was there but that he did not like.^[16]

Attention to authorial intent:

Chase’s framing of the interpretive question commits a classic blunder: swapping in original intent for original meaning. In our constitutional system, law is made by enacting texts, not by searching for the unenacted wishes of lawmakers.^[17]

And commitment to the rationality of law:

[I]t is easy for a judge to use [authorial intent] as an excuse for reading into the text his own views of what the law should be. After all, the authors of the provision were reasonable people, trying to do reasonable things, and, I, the judge, am also reasonable, so surely if I don’t like this result, they wouldn’t have liked this result, and therefore it must not be the result. To write it down this way would give up the game, but it is too easy to think it.^[18]

Though their pejorative tone is unwarranted, Baude and Paulsen are not wrong in their description of Chase’s jurisprudence. Chase does spend far more time on the consequences of the proposed construction of Section Three, the intent of the amendment’s framers, and the demands of legal reason holistically understood, than on close textual analysis. Some extended excerpts will at this point be helpful. Here is Chase on the need to avoid mischievous consequences, in the abstract:

Was this a correct construction? In the examination of questions of this sort, great attention is properly paid to the argument from inconvenience. This argument, it is true, cannot prevail over plain words or clear reason. But, on the other hand, a construction, which must necessarily occasion great public and private mischief, must never be preferred to a construction which will occasion neither, or neither in so great degree, unless the terms of the instrument absolutely require such preference. Let it then be considered what consequences would spring from the literal interpretation contended for in behalf of the petition.^[19]

And as applied to Section Three:

The object of the amendment is to exclude from certain offices a certain class of persons. Now, it is obviously impossible to do this by a simple declaration, whether in the constitution or in an act of congress, that all persons included within a particular description shall not hold office. For, in the very nature of things, it must be ascertained what particular individuals are embraced by the definition, before any sentence of exclusion can be made to operate. To accomplish this ascertainment and ensure effective results, proceedings, evidence, decisions, and enforcements of decisions, more or less formal, are indispensable; and these can only be provided for by congress.^[20]

Chase on the relevance of the framers’ intentions:

There are, indeed, other sections than the third, to the enforcement of which legislation is necessary; but there is no one which more clearly requires legislation in order to give effect to it. The fifth section qualifies the third to the same extent as it would if the whole amendment consisted of these two sections. And the final clause of the third section itself is significant. It gives to congress absolute control of the whole operation of the amendment. These are its words: “But congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.” Taking the third section then, in its completeness with this final clause, it seems to put beyond reasonable question the conclusion that the intention of the people of the United States, in adopting the fourteenth amendment, was to create a disability, to be removed in proper cases by a two-thirds vote, and to be made operative in other cases by the legislation of congress in its ordinary course. This construction gives certain effect to the undoubted intent of the amendment to insure the exclusion from office of the designated class of persons, if not relieved from their disabilities, and avoids the manifold evils which must attend the construction insisted upon by the counsel for the petitioner.^[21]

Chase on the law as a harmonious whole:

Of two constructions, either of which is warranted by the words of an amendment of a public act, that is to be preferred which best harmonizes the amendment with the general terms and spirit of the act amended. This principle forbids a construction of the amendment, not clearly required by its terms, which will bring it into conflict or disaccord with the other provisions of the constitution.^[22]

Baude and Paulsen are right: Chase has no interest in mechanically identifying Section Three’s ‘objective’ meaning regardless of its inconvenience, unintentionality, and irrationality. Against Justice Chase’s commitment to the rationality of law, Baude and Paulsen argue that, if their reading of Section Three seems absurd, it is the law nevertheless—although for “absurd,” they would substitute the term “radical”:

[T]he disqualification reflects and embodies the distinctive political impulses of the so-called Radical Republican Congress that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866. If its disqualification had radical policy consequences for the South, so be it.^[23]

The argument for legal rationality over radical literalism has been made elsewhere, and I will not rehash it. But I will note the irony implicit in Baude and Paulsen’s decision to attack Griffin’s Case on originalist grounds. Given how naturally Chief Justice Chase takes up the interpretive tools of the classical legal tradition, whence their confidence that originalism is the rule in “our constitutional system”?^[24]

Baude and Paulsen do have one more card up their sleeve: they accuse Chase of ethical impropriety. After holding that habeas relief was unwarranted because Section Three is not self-executing, Chase went on in the last lines of the opinion to state that the full Supreme Court—which had not heard the case—agreed with the reasoning of a non-constitutional alternative holding which also barred habeas relief. This course of action was allegedly improper, first, because Chase reached out to decide a constitutional issue unnecessarily, and, second, because his statement implied that the Supreme Court either decided, or issued an advisory opinion about, a question not before it.^[25] Both halves of the accusation are interesting, for they reveal a deep disagreement about the proper role of the judge in the constitutional order.

Regarding the first half, Baude and Paulsen are correct that Chase’s approach would have been improper under the modern doctrine of constitutional avoidance. But, as the response by Tillman and Blackman explains, that doctrine was far from settled law in Chase’s day, and there were strong prudential reasons for Chase to signal his views on the constitutional question: if he had not done so, the problem of the non-self-executing disability would only have gotten worse. The recently ratified Section Three required replacing large numbers of former Confederates who held office in the South, but it was unclear exactly how this task was to be accomplished. By publicly stating that Section Three was not self-executing, Chase prompted Congress to act on the issue and so avoided the problems that would have resulted from prolonged inaction.^[26] Despite Baude and Paulsen’s accusation that he “knee-capped the Fourteenth Amendment,”^[27] Chase arguably helped ensure its orderly implementation.

Regarding the accusation’s second half, it is certainly unusual^[28] to report the opinion of the Supreme Court on an abstract legal question outside a decision on a case or controversy before it. But to discern whether an unusual action was also improper requires understanding why it was taken. Here is Chase’s statement in full:

This subject received the consideration of the judges of the supreme court at the last term, with reference to this and kindred cases in this district, and I am authorized to say that they unanimously concur in the opinion that a person convicted by a judge de facto acting under color of office, though not de jure, and detained in custody in pursuance of his sentence, can not be properly discharged upon habeas corpus.^[29]

The reference to “kindred cases” holds the key. Griffin’s Case was far from the only collateral attack on the acts of legitimately appointed officials now potentially subject to Section Three disqualification. Indeed, Judge Underwood, the district judge in Griffin’s Case, had already presided over several other such cases, and had engaged in procedural maneuvering meant to insulate them from appellate review. It seems that the Supreme Court took the unusual step of authorizing Chase to speak for it in a circuit court opinion in order to deal with an unusual problem: a federal district judge abusing his power to undermine the integrity of the state courts.^[30]

The solutions reached by Chase may seem unacceptable to one who views law as “a technique like doing a math problem,” where the judge’s only task is to answer the official Question Presented.^[31] But to one who sees that “law is an art or a craft of judgment” which “requires the virtue of regnative prudence,” Chase’s opinion in Griffin’s Case will seem a skillful navigation of uncharted waters.^[32] That the Supreme Court in 1869 unanimously authorized Chase’s disclosure (there is no suggestion to the contrary) suggests to which jurisprudential vision it adhered. They would not wait in their oak-paneled chambers for isolated legal puzzles to arrive in their inbox, but rather would thoughtfully guide the legal regime so as to implement—not the interpretation of Section Three most desired by the most radical supporters of the Radical Reconstruction Congress—but the interpretation best adapted to serve the common good.

III

Professors are not judges. Neither, however, are they Martians, disinterested observers studying the human legal system as an empirical phenomenon akin to the social organization of ants. The law professors named in this essay regularly file amicus briefs in the federal courts, and even their scholarly publications reach practical conclusions: Baude and Paulsen’s Section Three article, for example, concludes by stating what “We the People should” do, what we “must” do, and what various public officials have a “duty” and “responsibility” to do (namely, remove Donald Trump from the ballot).^[33] This intertwining of legal practice and legal theory is nothing to be ashamed of. It goes back to the Roman jurists, who were closer to professors than judges, and yet are responsible for most of what we know as Roman law.^[34] But it does tell us something about how to evaluate a work of legal scholarship: we must consider not only the intellectual acumen on display, but also the prudence or lack thereof.

Judging from their Section Three article, Professors Baude and Paulsen adhere to a positivist version of the pseudo-classical maxim fiat iustitia ruat coelum^[35]—perhaps, obsequere legibus ruat coelum.^[36] Although I do not intend by these remarks any ad hominem, it must be noted that such a maxim, however morally serious it may seem, in fact serves to maximize the moral and political significance of originalist scholarship while insulating it from prudential considerations. Ordinary scientific research is subject to the needs of the body politic; for example, the insights derived from gain-of-function virology experiments must be weighed against the risk of a lab leak. But if originalist research tells us what we must do, while at the same time originalist researchers are simply identifying empirical facts, the originalist need neither acquire the virtue of prudence nor subordinate himself to one who possesses it. Intellectual acumen is all that is required.

The case of Professor Calabresi is more complex. A founding member of the Federalist Society (albeit one who has been asked not to identify himself as such),^[37] he must be well aware that originalism is not a timeless academic theory so much as an ideological tool for conservative coalition-building. Too, he was not an author of the Baude-Paulsen article, and yet he chose very publicly to endorse its conclusions.^[38] Given this background, his subsequent retraction^[39] is peculiar in two respects. First, Calabresi changed his mind—not because Section Three was not self-executing—nor because its implementation required due process or free speech protections—nor because Trump had not engaged in insurrection—but because Trump, the former occupant of the office of President of the United States, had never been “an officer of the United States.”^[40] True, originalist source-mongering can overcome many first impressions about what words mean, but their conclusion that the President is an Officer of the United States hardly seems the severest flaw in Baude and Paulsen’s article. Why would this counterargument be the one Calabresi found convincing? Second, Calabresi’s letter attributed his conversion to a September 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush’s last attorney general—and yet, in the same breath, it noted that the relevant issue is one Calabresi has been wrestling with for decades.^[41] How often does a serious scholar change his mind on a longstanding and well-ventilated debate based on a short essay in the popular press?

All things considered, it does not seem unfair to wonder whether Calabresi was influenced, not only by Mukasey’s arguments, but also by non-legal commentary focused on the proposal’s obvious imprudence. As one New York Times columnist put it:

Even if Baude and Paulsen were deemed correct on some pure empyrean level of constitutional debate, and Salmon Chase or anyone else deemed completely wrong, their correctness would be unavailing in reality, and their prescription as a political matter would be so disastrous and toxic and self-defeating that no responsible jurist or official should consider it.^[42]

Perhaps Calabresi is to be commended for retracting an imprudent demand upon realizing its imprudence, and for finding a way to do so that preserves as much as possible of what he found convincing in Baude and Paulsen’s argument.^[43] Unfortunately, given positivist originalism’s public commitment to the separation of law and prudence, we may never know.^[44]

1. Steven Calabresi, Trump is Disqualified from Being on Any Election Ballots, Volokh Conspiracy (Aug. 10, 2023), https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/10/trump-is-disqualified-from-being-on-any-election-ballots/. ↑
2. William Baude & Michael Stokes Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, 172 U. Penn. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (draft of August 9, 2023), https://ssrn.com/abstract=4532751. ↑
3. U.S. Const., amend. XIV, sec. 3. ↑
4. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 17-49. ↑
5. Id. at 49-61. ↑
6. Id. at 62 (“[T]here is a zone of reasonable, fair construction of allowable interpretation and application in which government officials may make judgments that must be conceded to be within the range of what the Constitution permits—and where the decisions and actions of government officials exercising their constitutional powers consequently cannot be considered unlawful and thereby subject to judicial invalidation.”); see also id. at 61-104 (identifying the plausible range of meanings for the terms in question). Strangely, Baude and Paulsen do not seem particularly attuned to the risk that state officials will wield their arguments in bad faith to remove candidates based on merely plausible interpretations of Section Three which even they know are not the best interpretation. In effect, Baude and Paulsen want courts to exercise Chevron deference toward state officials on the proper interpretation of Section Three. But see Antonin Scalia, Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. Rev. 511, 515 (noting that policy considerations play a central role in statutory interpretation, even when the court is engaging in Chevron deference). ↑
7. Id. at 104-11. ↑
8. Id. at 112-24. ↑
9. Josh Blackman & Seth Barrett Tillman, Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen (draft of September 12, 2023), https://ssrn.com/abstract=4568771. ↑
10. Steven Calabresi, Letter to the Editor, President Trump Can Not Be Disqualified, Wall St. J. (Sept. 12, 2023), https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-can-not-be-disqualified-14th-amendment-calabresi-16657a1b. Even more recently, Calabresi made another blog post further elaborating on his change of mind. Steven Calabresi, Donald Trump Should Be On the Ballot and Should Lose, Volokh Conspiracy (Sept. 16, 2023), https://reason.com/volokh/2023/09/16/steve-calabresi-donald-trump-should-be-on-the-ballot-and-should-lose/. ↑
11. Act of May 22, 1872, ch. 193, 17 Stat. 142. ↑
12. See, e.g., William Baude & Stephen E. Sachs, Grounding Originalism, 113 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1455 (2019) (defending positivist originalism); William Baude & Stephen E. Sachs, Originalism and the Law of the Past, 37 Law & Hist. Rev. 809 (2019) (describing the relationship between originalism and historical research). ↑
13. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 123 (emphasis added) ↑
14. 11 F. Cas. 7 (C.C.D. Va. 1869) (No. 5815), archived at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F.Cas/0011.f.cas/0011.f.cas.0007.html. ↑
15. Id. at 26. ↑
16. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 40 (emphasis added) ↑
17. Id. at 41. ↑
18. Id. at 41-42. ↑
19. 11 F. Cas. at 24. ↑
20. Id. at 26. ↑
21. Id. ↑
22. Id. at 25. ↑
23. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 8. ↑
24. Id. at 41; see also William Baude, Is Originalism Our Law?, 115 Colum. L. Rev. 2349 (2015) (answering “yes”). ↑
25. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 45-47. ↑
26. Blackman & Tillman, supra note 9, at 38-40; see generally id. 32-70. For example: if lower courts had proceeded to remove state officials absent congressional implementing legislation, the appeals courts would, in Chase’s view, have been obliged to restore them to office, a move which would have given the impression that the judiciary sympathized with the former rebels. Id. at 38. ↑
27. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 49. Baude and Paulsen also, in a moment of bizarre hyperbole, compare Chase’s opinion in Griffin’s Case, which deferred to Congress on the manner by which insurrectionists should be identified and removed and ensured that an indisputedly guilty prisoner did not go free, to Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which stripped Congress of its ability to regulate slavery in the territories and ensured the inevitability of the Civil War. Id. at 6 (writing that “In re Griffin should be hooted down the pages of history, purged from our constitutional understanding of Section Three,” a paraphrase of Senator Charles Sumner’s evaluation of Dred Scott); see Blackman & Tillman, supra note 9, at 36 (identifying this allusion). ↑
28. Although, as Blackman and Tillman discuss, it is not unheard of. Blackman & Tillman, supra note 9, at 64-65. ↑
29. 11 F. Cas. at 27. ↑
30. Blackman & Tillman, supra note 8, at 64-67. ↑
31. Adrian Vermeule, The Common Good as a Legal Concept, Ius & Iustitum (Nov. 16, 2022), https://iusetiustitium.com/the-common-good-as-a-legal-concept/. ↑
32. Id. Indeed, the prudence required may even sometimes involve “creativ[ity].” See N.W. Barber & Adrian Vermeule, The Exceptional Role of Courts in the Constitutional Order, 92 Notre Dame L. Rev. 817, 843 (2016). ↑
33. Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 124-26. ↑
34. See, e.g., Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition 134-37 (1983) (describing the work of the Roman jurists and how they made their way into the Corpus Juris Civilis). ↑
35. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” ↑
36. “Let the law be followed, though the heavens fall.” Or, in Baude and Paulsen’s formulation: “[I]t is wrong to shrink from observing, and enforcing, the Constitution’s commands on the premise that doing so might be unpopular in some quarters, or fuel political anger, or resentment, or opposition, or retaliation.” Baude & Paulsen, supra note 2, at 125. ↑
37. Adam Liptak, Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6, N. York Times (Aug. 13, 2023) (quoting Steven Calabresi), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/trump-jan-6-insurrection-conservatives.html (“I have been asked not to talk to any journalist who identifies me as a co-founder of the Federalist Society, even though it is a historical fact.”). ↑
38. See Calabresi, supra note 1; Liptak, supra note 37 (quoting Steven Calabresi). ↑
39. See Calabresi, supra note 10. ↑
40. Id. ↑
41. Id. (citing Michael B. Mukasey, Was Trump ‘an Officer of the United States’?, Wall St. J. (Sept. 7, 2023), https://www.wsj.com/articles/was-trump-an-officer-of-the-united-states-constitution-14th-amendment-50b7d26). ↑
42. Ross Douthat, When the Law is Not a Trump Card, N. York Times (Aug. 18, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/opinion/trump-indictment-disqualify.html. On a proper understanding of law, of course, Douthat’s opening concession is ill-formed, for there simply is no “pure empyrean level of constitutional debate” insulated from matters of regnative prudence. ↑
43. It should also be noted that Calabresi’s new position preserves much of the Baude-Paulsen’s position’s practical consequences. If Trump is not automatically disqualified solely because he was never an “officer of the United States,” then those of his supporters who were such officers—for example, members of the House of Representatives—will still be automatically disqualified. Although the arguments articulated by Justice Chase against automatic disqualifications of any sort remain strong, it must be admitted that automatically disqualifying a congressman poses a far less serious threat to the body politic than doing so to a former President. ↑
44. See, e.g., Adam Liptak, An About-Face on Whether the 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office, N. YORK TIMES (Sept. 18, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/us/politics/trump-calabresi-14th-amendment.html (stating, based on the author’s interview with Calabresi, that “politics had not figured in his thinking”). ↑