An Alternate Method to Impeachment

Submitted to a couple of newspapers but not yet published.

An Alternate Method to Impeachment

Nancy Pelosi seems bent on the impeachment path to punish Trump for his January 6^th insurrection activities and to keep him out of public office in the future. And while branding Trump as the only President to be twice impeached my be a fitting punishment for leading the charge on the Capital, it is a clumsy and indirect method for keeping him out of future public office.

Mitch McConnell will not hold the Senate Impeachment Trial of Trump until January 20^th or 21^st, after Trump is already out of office. And he will no doubt again call for an acquittal vote without examining the evidence or calling witnesses.

And were this hollow acquittal granted while Trump was still in office, the matter would be finished. Impeachment is a process to remove an unfit President, and if he is not removed, the second vote, to bar the unfit President from ever holding future public office, requiring only a simple majority in both houses, cannot take place.

But he Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe argues that if the Senate vote to remove the President takes place after the President's term in office has expired, the action is moot, as the President has already been removed from office by his term expiring. And he postulates that the second vote, to bar Trump from future public office, requiring only a simple majority in both houses, can still take place.

But no one really knows how this would play out as it operates at the absolute limits of our system and has never been tested before the Supreme Court.

Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment offers an alternate method for keeping Trump, and his henchmen such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from future public office.

Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment was put in place to keep American officials, who betrayed the United States by joining the Confederacy, from regaining their public offices in the reconstituted United States. The exact text of the amendment is as follows:

Fourteenth Amendment

Section 3

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, to support the Constitution of the United States, 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.

Under this amendment, only a simple majority of the House and Senate is required to bar Donald Trump, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz from public office as they have all encouraged and participated in efforts to mount an insurrection against the United States in their support of the January 6^th assault on the Unite States Capital.

They are all on video record with words of support and encouragement for the insurrectionists. And the Democrats may be able to apply this remedy to the other Republicans who made baseless objections to the Electoral Vote count.

The Democrats in the House and the Senate will have this majority implement this remedy after Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock and Kamala Harris are sworn in next week, after January 20^th.

Again, this would be operating at the untested outer extremes of the law. But both the plain language of the amendment, and the actions of Trump and his cohorts, are clear. And the amendment applies, and the Supreme Court would require some pretty long and outrageous reaches to strike down the legislation. And they may be reluctant to do this as Joe Biden and the Democratic House and Senate could apply some very draconian fixes to the stacked Supreme Court in response. I discuss one possible response here: https://www.writerscafe.org/writing/Miss_Fedelm/2479356/ .