Democrats want to ban Donald Trump from office

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With Joe Biden gradually becoming America’s most-disliked president, Democrats are making frantic bids of banning Donald Trump from holding office by using an obscure section of the US Constitution.

According to an exclusive report published in The Hill, which first broke the story, roughly a dozen Democrat legislators have spoken, either publicly or privately, about invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to disqualify the former president from running again.

That provision, meant to apply to former Confederate officials who had previously taken an oath to the United States and subsequently “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” forbids those individuals from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State”.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 riot, some Democrats had floated using Section 3 against wide swaths of Republicans, including some suggestions that any GOP legislator who voted against certifying the results might fall under the aegis of a provision clearly meant for former Confederates or others in the future who would similarly engage in active insurrection or rebellion against the United States.

However, the left — ever the proponents of the theory of the living Constitution — seem enamored of the idea that “insurrection” or “rebellion” could involve, say, challenging electoral results.

“If anything, the idea has waxed and waned,” liberal Harvard Law School constitutional expert Laurence Tribe told The Hill. “I hear it being raised with considerable frequency these days both by media commentators and by members of Congress and their staffs, some of whom have sought my advice on how to implement Section 3”.

Among the dozen Democrats The Hill said have talked about invoking Section 3 publicly or privately include, for starters, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, January 6 House Select Committee member and former Trump impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Raskin, after Trump’s acquittal by the Senate last February, said the former president was “right in the bullseye middle of that group” covered by Section 3, telling ABC News “he really does fulfill exactly the constitutional prohibition there.”

“The point is that the constitutional purpose is clear, to keep people exactly like Donald Trump and other traitors to the union from holding public office”.

“Presumably, it could be done both affirmatively and defensively”, he continued. “People — you know if he tried to run for office again — people could try to stop him in the states. It also conceivably could be an affirmative statement by state legislators, by Congress, by other institutions.

“So we’d have to figure it out and do some more research about all of that, but the point is that the constitutional purpose is clear, to keep people exactly like Donald Trump and other traitors to the union from holding public office”.

Raskin didn’t comment when contacted by The Hill, nor did Nadler. As for Wasserman Schultz, she said, “I continue to explore all legal paths to ensure that the people who tried to subvert our democracy are not in charge of it”.

While this question seemed merely academic last year — more of a hypothetical outlet for liberal rage whereby figures of loathing like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri could be tarred, feathered and sent back to their respective states, never able to hold so much as a dog catcher’s office again — events of late seem to indicate this isn’t just a parlor game anymore.

In October, a Rolling Stone piece which claimed — via two anonymous sources — that Republican members of Congress or their staffs had coordinated with January 6 rally organizers drew calls from Democrats to have them expelled for insurrection. The piece didn’t claim they had anything to do with the riot, mind you, and all of the organizing was lawful, but that didn’t stop anybody:

Meanwhile, Marc Elias — the Democrats’ top election lawyer and the man who, among other things, helped finance the scandalous Steele dossier — has talked about disqualifying House members through Section 3, possibly even via litigation.

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