It happens every holiday. America experiences a collective brain drain. I’m sure you’ve noticed. With Congress and the White House both out of town and no real news to report, media outlets fill their airtime and opinion pages with pure pap: outrageous mental meanderings that would never be given space or taken seriously in normal times.

This holiday season, for example, the media has been consumed by speculation about the 14th Amendment — prompted by rulings by the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows that, under that amendment’s wording, Donald Trump is ineligible to run for president and therefore will not appear on their states’ ballots. The media has been further preoccupied with the certainty that their decisions would be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Whereupon the flood gates of mindless speculation burst open. Pundits, politicians and quasi-legal scholars cried foul. On three counts. First,........

© The Hill