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Notes -
[following from Ashlael originally]
There's a lot of damning things, at a pretty wide variety of levels. Again, if you want to make the argument that Trump's behavior was bad, indefensible, or impeachable, I'm right there with you. But incitement is not 'this is bad++'. It is not even the category of 'this speech is illegal++'.
Under modern jurisprudence, the speech must be intended to cause imminent lawless action, and be likely to do so. Pointing at things he said after already starting a riot is kinda missing the test; him "fanning the flames" is not just insufficient but has been insufficient for seventy-plus years. ((This gets even harder if you must prove that Trump intended them to commit insurrection, rather than inciting mere riot or threatening speech by others, though I make no assessment of whether this would be required for the 14th Amendment.)) And as bad as Trump's behavior was, or how useful his disqualification might seem in the moment, there are good pragmatic reasons to want to keep this rule here; even outside of the question of other politicians who've 'summoned' rioters, the extent protest leaders or organizers can be held responsible for the violence of people attributed to their movement is not some theoretical question.
There’s reason that Baude/Paulsen start channeling the wacko sides of the alt-right when they talk about the First Amendment being overridden by the Fourteenth.
That sounds like fifteen or sixteen thousand examples. The problem is that I can't find any serious breakdown of every or even a large number of those petitions, even ones giving higher numbers of the total disqualified ("twenty thousand men scattered throughout this country who are under the disability of the fourteenth amendment", from someone who might know). What I can find overwhelmingly points to Confederate officers and soldiers, suppliers and politicians. They look and sound more like evidence, if individually weak evidence, of disqualification focusing on its stricter terms.
That doesn't always mean those disqualified did things that were worse than Trump, or even that what they were disqualified for was even bad -- Senter and Nelson weren't great men during Reconstruction, but were anti-Succession and only held office in the Confederacy as a quirk of fate. But I can't find an example of, say, a propaganda writer or chickenhawk Fire-Eater; when I go looking, I tend to find people who probably should have been disqualified and were not instead (tbf, in Brown's case, likely for political reasons, as Georgia was a particular clusterfuck, and I haven't been able to confirm he was not given amnesty or un-disqualified by Congress). And you'd think that the advocates of the more expansive takes of Section 3 would be quick to highlight one, if such evidence existed.
Meanwhile, large as these numbers are, they're tiny compared to the number of sworn (surviving) soldiers and political officers of the Confederacy, the clear and central condition for disqualification. Not all of them would be disqualified to start with, if only for lack of previous oath, but you could probably fill almost that entire roster just those who surrendered at a handful of battles.
And from the other direction, while I've not seen any provide 'fanning the flames'-level incitement as cause for disqualification, I can point to Vallandigham, who was far more closely tied to specific actions, had clearly-covered past offices, and was neither challenged nor as far as I can tell felt he needed to apply to Congress to try for office. And that was one of the examples Baude/Paulsen and the Amar brothers picked out!
I'm not denying Stanbery's analysis; he clearly finds incitement to be cause for disqualification. And it's certainly possible that Stanbery's analysis was broader than the modern-day understanding of the term. Indeed, likely it was at least a little broader, though Confederate abuses of the term against Union officers had lead to serious skepticism.
But it's not like there was some shortage of Southern Confederate blowhards and other Cavaliers who ran their mouths more than their feet or money; the paucity of even attempts or arguments about such cases seem to be a mark against modern-day efforts to read Stanbery's incitement to far more maximalist and sweeping breadths than he or his compatriots every used.
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