A presidential campaign run from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary is not an auspicious weigh station on the road to the White House. But it was the “campaign headquarters” for the only convicted felon to run for the highest office in the land.

The ingenious framers of the U.S. Constitution covered manifold contingencies when they drafted our founding document, and presumably left some outlier issues to voter common sense. That is why nothing in the Constitution prohibited Eugene Debs, a 1920 presidential candidate running as the standard bearer of the Socialist Party, from seeking the presidency.

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