Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s”The ReidOut” that the Constitution disqualified former President Donald Trump from running for president or being seated in the office because he “participated in insurrection.”
Raskin said, “The hard question is not should the courts end up deciding because the courts will have to decide this because it’s a Constitutional question. The hard part is, did he engage in insurrection or rebellion? That’s the hard part for some people. Is incitement to insurrection participating in insurrection? The House of Representatives already impeached him for inciting insurrection. 57 of 100 senators voted to determine that he did engage in incitement to insurrection, so you have robust bipartisan, bicameral majorities defining that as a legislative fact.”
He added, “But I think the alternative argument will be no, you need a criminal conviction first. It’s not enough to show that it happened. And you know, against that, I would simply say, the language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says that you can’t run for office if you have sworn an oath to the Constitution, but then you participated in insurrection rebellion. It doesn’t say if you have been convicted of insurrection or rebellion. But I think that that will become really the heart of the legal argument.”
He concluded, “Donald Trump tried to overthrow Constitutional democracy. And the Constitution has a mechanism for dealing with that which is a very strongly pro-democratic mechanism. It says this is a big country. a lot of people can be president. You don’t have to go back to somebody who has already proven himself to be untrustworthy by being disloyal to the Constitution and trying to overthrow the constitutional order.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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