[This post is co-authored with Professor Seth Barrett Tillman]
The sequence of events over the past week could not have been scripted. On Thursday, September 7, former-federal judge, and former-Attorney General Michael Mukasey published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, contending that the President was not an "Officer of the United States" for purposes of Section 3. We had no clue this piece was coming, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that his thinking aligned with our own. At that point, we were nearing completion of our draft article on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. We added a new footnote referencing Mukasey's op-ed, but otherwise we planned to spend the next few days finalizing our draft article. The document was finalized late in the evening of Monday, September 11, and was posted to SSRN shortly after midnight. On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 12, Professor Steve Calabresi's letter to the editor ran in the Wall Street Journal. Calabresi also concluded that the President is not an "Officer of the United States" for purposes of Section 3. When Steve had submitted his letter, he had not yet seen our new article on Section 3. And we had no clue Steve would publish that view in the WSJ. Here again we were pleasantly surprised.
After we saw Calabresi's letter, our minds turned to Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar. Amar and Calabresi are long-time friends, have taught a class together at Yale, regularly cite and respond to each other's material, and are co-authors of a leading constitutional law treatise. We realized that Calabresi's position was now in tension with Amar's position. Nearly three decades ago, Vikram and Akhil Amar argued that there is no difference between "Officers of the United States" and "Office[s] . . . under the United States," and the President is covered by both phrases.
