Democrats Working On Plan To Ban Trump From Ever Holding Office Again

A group of Democrats are working on a plan to use the 14th Amendment to prevent Donald Trump from ever holding office again. The plan is fairly sound, but it would be contingent on a string of events taking place that ultimately would have to rely on Trump being convicted of either sedition or something very close to that. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this plan and what it would take for it to actually work.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Democrats are finally starting to get serious about trying to prevent Donald Trump from holding office again here in the United States. So a group of them, a handful really from the House of Representatives, have been talking with legal scholars, including Laurence Tribe, about how they can do anything at all to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again, because polls show if Trump were to run again, especially against Biden if he runs for a second term, it looks like Trump could easily win that election. And that's a terrifying thought. So one of the possible solutions they've come up with is section three of the 14th amendment that says that, office holders who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same are disqualified from future office. Short, sweet, simple and kind of hard to prove, unfortunately.

Now we know, of course, based on the available evidence, Donald Trump's office was in fact spreading tons of lies about the election being stolen. And they also had plenty of different plans, some of them laid out in a PowerPoint, on how to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Does that rise to the level of insurrection? Is that sedition? That would be a question that the courts would have to determine. And since they did not put any of these plans in motion, they had wanted to don't get me wrong, but without actual action on those plans, it turns into just a group of people talking in a room. So that's a little bit more difficult to prove. On the other hand, maybe that's not the route to go. Maybe you look at what Donald Trump said at that rally, go and fight like hell or you're not gonna have a country anymore.

Now, to me, that particular language does seem to suggest that Donald Trump is encouraging people to go do the insurrection, which of course would be sedition and that would fall under this definition. The problem with that is that you've gotta be able to convict him for it. We can't just go out there and say, yep, Trump did an insurrection, 14th amendment says you can't run for office again. You're done. Ha ha. No, it has to be a legal judgment. You have to have a specific ruling from a court that stands up upon appeal that says that he did in fact do this. Once you have that, then of course you invoke the 14th amendment. He is barred from holding office ever again, case closed. But it's getting the judgment that is going to be so incredibly difficult. But of course the Democrats in the House say, wait, we may have a plan for that as well.

They have crafted legislation that would allow for the attorney general to make the case that this guy did in fact, engage in an insurrection before a three judge panel, the three judge panel would then make the determination. It would be a relatively easy process, very quick. It's not a full blown trial. But if you do that without a full blown trial, you could also run into some constitutional issues and it may be less likely to hold up with the Supreme Court. So I guess all of this is to say that there are ways to prevent Donald Trump from running for office again. But I think that these ways require so much effort and so many things to go right, in fact, not just go right, it has to go perfectly, that I would almost categorize these as impossible. Instead, what we need to do is continue the work on the January 6th select committee.