In an interview for MSNBC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — currently the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee — said that Constitutional restrictions on individuals who engaged in insurrection later holding office clearly applied to former President Donald Trump, blocking him from the presidency — which he’s now seeking, again.
Now, it’s a question of which path the courts will take in what argument around the involved Constitutional amendment is actually imposed.
The restrictions apply specifically to individuals who reneged on an oath of office by engaging in insurrection, and the connection made to Trump is the deadly violence of January 6, 2021, which was carried out after he spent months lying about what had transpired during the then-recent presidential election. Two Colorado courts, including the state’s highest, deemed Trump to have engaged in insurrection, and the latter also applied those Constitutional restrictions to Trump — though they put their ruling on hold with litigation set to continue. The U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to hear arguments, with oral arguments to that court happening next month — a quick turnaround.
“To know the law here is to understand that Donald Trump is disqualified, and there’s nothing undemocratic about it, which is what I keep hearing from the far precincts of the Right,” Raskin said, adding: “Donald Trump is in a tiny group of fewer than a dozen people probably who have disqualified themselves by engaging in insurrection or rebellion. You could view this as the most defensible category of disqualification for being president, because you choose to be in it.”
The Maryland Democrat also condemned the idea that those restrictions in the Constitution don’t even apply to the presidency at all. “That one is not even a serious issue,” Raskin said.
Previously, observers from the legal profession on MSNBC noted that Trump wasn’t leading with the argument at the U.S. Supreme Court that he didn’t engage in insurrection, though it does appear in his filings. Perhaps pushing it down was indicative of an acknowledgement of strength to the implicating evidence.
