AN OPEN LETTER TO NEAL KATYAL

From Margaret Ellison, Retired English Teacher

Dear Mr. Katyal,

I saw you recently on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, and I am writing because I cannot shake the feeling that this country has engineered a deliberate crisis of reading comprehension.

I taught English for thirty-eight years.

My entire career revolved around teaching children that words matter, sequence matters, and sentences do not stop meaning what they mean simply because the implications become uncomfortable.

Which brings me to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

A president summoned supporters to Washington, urged them to fight, watched for hours while the Capitol was attacked, publicly targeted his own vice president during the assault, praised the attackers afterward, reframed them as victims and hostages, pardoned them, and has now engineered a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded compensation scheme for the very people he sent.

I do not understand how an English teacher is expected to read that sequence and not arrive at the phrase “aid and comfort.”

And I especially do not understand why so many intelligent people speak as though impeachment is the only constitutional mechanism available when Section 3 already describes a disability and explicitly explains how Congress may remove it by a two-thirds vote.

Remove it.

That is the word the amendment uses.

Not create.

Not impose.

Remove.

As a teacher, I spent decades warning students to pay attention to verbs because verbs tell you what a sentence is actually doing.

This verb appears to matter enormously.

Because if the Constitution provides a mechanism for removing a disability, then the plain reading suggests the disability already exists absent congressional action.

Otherwise the amendment becomes grammatically absurd. A fire extinguisher with instructions for extinguishing fires no one is ever permitted to acknowledge.

Mr. Katyal, constitutional litigation is more difficult than diagramming sentences. I understand that. But there comes a point where legal caution stops being prudence and starts being participation in the evasion.

I am not asking you to file a brief tomorrow.

I am asking you something simpler:

Would you feel comfortable standing before the Supreme Court and arguing the plain meaning of these words exactly as written?

Because I suspect millions of Americans would finally feel less insane hearing someone say aloud what they can already read for themselves.

And I suspect you already know what that argument is.

Respectfully,

Margaret Ellison
Retired English Teacher
Duluth, Minnesota

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