A thought occurred to us worthy of discussion.
The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, those holy men whose intent must be devised and divined from the historical clues they left us, wrote Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to make ineligible from holding office anyone who engaged in insurrection against the United States.
The current group of five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court [hereinafter Gang of 5 to 6] wrote that article three cannot be applied until Congress enacts laws to explain how section three should be applied. In other words, section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was meaningless when written, and will continue to be meaningless until Congress enacts additional legislation. The section is not self-executing and cannot be used until Congress does more.
Is there any other part of the Constitution that was meaningless upon ratification without more from Congress?
The Gang of 5-6 decide nothing that is not consistent with original intent. Thus, the Gang of 5-6 are saying that those who wrote section 3, and the States that ratified it as an amendment to the Constitution, all agreed that they were enacting a meaningless section without further action.
Interesting that for the first and only time, the Supreme Court has devised and divined that the framers of a part of the Constitution wrote something that they did not intend to be effective without more.
Hmmmm……