Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lady Macbeth, and Past Participles
If you’ve ever taken an English class and had to read Macbeth, you’re probably familiar with one of the biggest debates surrounding the play: Who is more at fault, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth? To refresh your memory in case it’s been a while, Macbeth is a dude who is loyal to King Duncan, but Macbeth ends up murdering the king in order to become king himself. This seems like a pretty open and shut case until you consider Lady Macbeth’s role. I’d like to start today by doing a quick dive into Lady Macbeth’s culpability. Because even though she doesn’t wield the dagger that ultimately kills Duncan, I believe that she is just as guilty as Macbeth.
Interestingly, the play opens with an insurrection. People are rising up against Duncan, so Macbeth steps in to help quell the revolt. As a reward, Duncan grants Macbeth a royal title. This is only after a group of three witches tell Macbeth that he’s going to be king one day.
Fast forward to Macbeth sharing this news with his wife. Lady Macbeth worries that her husband is too soft to fulfill the witches’ prophecy, so she sends a prayer out to the spirits: “unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty” (1.5.41-43). She asks them to prevent her from feeling pity so that she won’t stop this prophecy from happening. She then tells her husband to act nice but think like a villain: “Look like th’innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t” (1.5.65-66). She ends this scene saying, “Leave all the rest to me” (1.5.73).
After Duncan arrives at their home, Macbeth chickens out. He even says to Lady Macbeth: “We will proceed no further in this business” (1.7.32). Lady Macbeth questions Macbeth’s masculinity, saying that if he were to kill the king he’d be even more of a man. She’s also the one that comes up with the plan: After Duncan goes to sleep she’ll get the guards drunk so that they pass out and don’t remember a thing, then the two of them can frame the guards as the murders. Macbeth doesn’t really push back on this — he very quickly agrees.
Later that night, after drugging the guards, Lady Macbeth even admits, “Had [Duncan] not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t” (2.2.12-13). Macbeth kills Duncan, but he almost immediately starts feeling guilty. Lady Macbeth says, “Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures… / If he do bleed, / I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt” (2.2.59-61). Then she goes and finishes the job.
So, there you have it. There’s no question that Macbeth murdered Duncan — he was the one who held the dagger and stabbed the king — but how culpable is Lady Macbeth? On a scale of “not at all” to “even more than Macbeth,” where should we put her? It’s a tricky question without an easy answer, hence why English majors have been debating it for ages.
Here’s my take. I think trying to figure out if one character is more guilty or less guilty than the other distracts from the bigger issue — namely, they’re both guilty. The court of law doesn’t require one guilty party to be “more” guilty than the other, simply that the two parties are guilty. And when it comes to Lady Macbeth, I think it’s pretty clear that she is guilty. From urging Macbeth to go through with the murder in the first place, to asking the spirits to fill her with cruelty, to smearing the guards’ daggers and faces with blood to frame them, these are not the actions of an innocent person. She is an accomplice to the crime, regardless of the fact that she didn’t stab Duncan.
Which brings us to yesterday’s court hearing with Marjorie Taylor Greene. If you’re not familiar, a nonprofit called Free Speech For People is arguing that Greene shouldn’t be allowed to run for re-election this November because her actions surrounding the January 6 insurrection disqualify her on the basis of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I watched about two hours of the hearing yesterday, and it was discouraging to see her evade questions by claiming she didn’t remember or didn’t recall certain details about statements she made, although I wasn’t surprised she used this tactic. What ended up interesting me the most was her lawyer’s closing argument. Attorney James Bopp delivered a disorganized, rambly mess of a closing argument — only slightly more competent than Hyper-Chicken, the chicken lawyer from Futurama. So for the rest of this article I want to deconstruct Bopp’s various arguments, since many of them rely on language. As an English major, I feel up to the challenge.
Before we can do that, though, let’s first look at the text in question. The 14th Amendment was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868. It provides many protections that were a direct result of the Civil War, most notably equal protection under the law. Section 3 is a short and specific section pertaining to ex-Confederates. Here is the entirety of Section 3:
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.
I bolded the main idea of Section 3, which is that no one can serve in the government if they have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the government. Free Speech For People argues that Greene violates this clause because she took her oath of office on January 3, 2021 and then engaged in the January 6 insurrection. Greene’s attorney dismisses this charge for several reasons that I’ll get into shortly, but essentially he’s taking the Macbeth defense — Greene did not storm the Capitol and she did not actively participate in the insurrection, so therefore she is not guilty of having engaged in an insurrection. But just like Lady Macbeth, Greene is an accomplice and should therefore be guilty of engagement.
First, Bopp tackles the last sentence of Section 3: “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” Meaning, Congress can, at any point — his argument, not mine — vote to remove this prohibition. This means a vote could happen on January 2, 2023 to allow her a second term, and because we have no idea what will happen in the future then we can’t dismiss or disqualify her from running for re-election now.
Two things about this argument: One, if Bopp is relying on Congress to vote to remove Greene’s disability to serve, that seems to indicate that she is, in fact, worthy of disability. And two, this argument of “what could happen in the future” seems moot — the fact is, such a vote hasn’t yet occurred. If Congress chooses to hold such a vote tomorrow, then by all means they should go for it, but if we wait for some date in the future, then we might always be waiting. Meaning, today’s future is January 2, 2023, but come January 2 what if Congress decides to vote on this issue October 11, 2023 — a completely arbitrary date in the future, but one where such a vote could conceivably happen. The important consideration here should be: has such a vote happened yet? Not: could it happen one day?
Bopp’s second argument is one of my favorites because we can go full English Major. Bopp introduced the Amnesty Act of 1872, a federal law passed four years after the ratification of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Here is the full text of the Amnesty Act of 1872:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each house concurring therein), that all political disabilities imposed by the third section of the fourteenth article of amendments of the Constitution of the United States are hereby removed from all persons whomsoever, except Senators and Representatives of the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States.
By focusing on the key part of the Amnesty Act (“all political disabilities imposed by the third section of the fourteenth article of amendments of the Constitution of the United States are hereby removed from all persons whomsoever”), Bopp argues that all disabilities listed in Section 3 are removed — therefore, there’s nothing in Section 3 that can disqualify Greene.
This is very very sneaky because it hinges on the grammatical interpretation of the word “imposed” in the line “all political disabilities imposed… are hereby removed.” I’ll let Bopp explain it the way he did to the judge: “The word ‘imposed’ is a past participle, meaning that phrase imposed by Section 3 is an adjective regarding what political disabilities we’re talking about.” But he’s wrong — “imposed” isn’t a past participle, it’s simply a verb in the past tense.
So, first: What is a past participle? And how does it differ from the past tense? A participle is when a verb is used as an adjective instead of a verb. A past participle is when the verb in question just so happens to be in the past tense. Also, unlike verbs in the past tense, the past participle is a verb that cannot be used on its own — meaning, it requires an auxiliary verb in order to be grammatically correct. Here are two examples:
Past tense: I walked around the park.
Past participle: I had walked around the park -OR- I have walked around the park.
Past tense: I ate dinner.
Past participle: I had eaten dinner -OR- I have eaten dinner.
The second example really emphasizes the fact that past participles require an auxiliary verb in order to be grammatically correct. You can’t say “I eaten dinner.” The only way for that to make sense is to say “I had eaten dinner” or “I have eaten dinner.” Without the auxiliary verb, it can’t stand on its own. So that, in a nutshell, is a past participle. Also, as you can see from the examples above, although the meanings of the two sample sentences are similar, there are subtle differences between the past tense form and the past participle form.
Let’s bring this back to the Amnesty Act of 1872. It said that: “all political disabilities imposed by the third section of the fourteenth article of amendments of the Constitution of the United States are hereby removed from all persons whomsoever.” And Bopp is claiming that “imposed” is the past participle, meaning that it’s being used as an adjective, not a verb. I think the clearest way to show what he means by claiming “imposed” is a past participle is to add some punctuation to the sentence: “all political disabilities (imposed by the third section of the fourteenth article of amendments of the Constitution of the United States) are hereby removed from all persons whatsoever.” You see the difference? Bopp is arguing that “imposed” should be an adjective describing the kind of political disabilities in question.
The thing is, he’s incorrect. As we talked about above, a past participle cannot stand on its own — it requires an auxiliary verb. Thus, in order for “imposed” to be a past participle, the Amnesty Act would need to say: “all political disabilities that were imposed by the third section…” or “all political disabilities that had been imposed by the third section…” Thus, “imposed” isn’t being used as a past participle, it’s simply a verb in the past tense. Which means that the Amnesty Act only removes those political disabilities already imposed on people by Section 3 — which is exactly how and why ex-Confederates were able to gain positions of power among local, state, and national government. In short, the Amnesty Act was written at a very specific time and for a very specific purpose. When it was passed (by the two-thirds majority mentioned in Section 3!), the Amnesty Act cleared everyone who had been disqualified from holding office up to that point. It doesn’t make any wide-spread gesture to remove such disabilities for all time.
Speaking of past participles, what’s interesting is that if you go back to Section 3, you’ll find a past participle: “No person shall… hold any office… who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same…” This means that “engaged” isn’t being used as a verb, but as an adjective. Bopp, of course, in claiming the Macbeth defense, sticks very closely to “engaged” in verb form: Because Greene didn’t storm the Capitol, because Greene didn’t shout “Hang Mike Pence!,” because Greene didn’t interrupt the certification of the Electoral College results, then she didn’t engage in the insurrection. But since “engaged” is a past participle, we just need to prove actions that would meet the adjective form of “engage” or “engaged.” Here are the top three definitions for “engage”:
occupy, attract, or involve (someone's interest or attention).
participate or become involved in.
arrange to employ or hire (someone).
The first definition seems pretty solid, the second is very close, and while the third isn’t as definite, it’s a possibility. As with Lady Macbeth, Greene is culpable — her words and actions prior to and on January 6 helped fuel the fire. And as Ron Fein, the lawyer representing Free Speech For People, mentioned in his closing argument: Jefferson Davis never picked up a firearm, but he was just as much an insurrectionist as the Confederate army.
So, there you have it. I leave you with two last things:
One, my favorite illustration of Bopp’s mess of a closing argument. At one point he went on a tangent about how the left wants to cancel words like “1776” or “Independence Day.” This is of course ludicrous, but he goes on to talk about how the left tries to paint anyone defending the 2nd Amendment as someone who wants to overthrow the government. He says: “And of course the 2nd Amendment says that the first part of the — ‘a well regulated militia necessary for a free republic’ or whatever — I don’t remember exactly.” (YouTube video here.) Yes, the lawyer who so scrupulously wanted to argue that “imposed” was a past participle suddenly turned flippant when it came to the text of the 2nd Amendment.
And finally, let’s not forget what happened to Lady Macbeth: She goes mad at the end. Her guilt catches up with her to the point where she hallucinates blood on her hands. What happens to her after that? I don’t recall.
