Legally, Trump Can’t Be President

<p>Itturns out you cannot carry out violent insurrections, and then hope to legally serve in the American government, according to the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, a rational and honest reading of our much-vaunted Constitution tells us that officeholders who become rebels are thereafter barred from holding public office, absent a two-thirds vote in Congress.</p> <p>This issue was recently raised by two prominent conservative constitutional scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, in a crucial <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">new article</a> published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The paper is making some waves in Washington, but the underlying logic seems unlikely to change the current trajectory of the GOP, where politics has calcified into absolute loyalty to Trump and his poisonous fairy tales.</p> <h2>Still, the utterly unambiguous language from Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment makes it quite clear:</h2> <blockquote> <p>“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, 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.”</p> </blockquote> <p> </p>