A Berkeley professor says that Donald Trump should not be allowed to run for president in 2024 because he “committed treason.” Robert Reich, who has over 1.5 million Twitter followers, argues that Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election amount to treason. He teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration.
“Trump is running for re-election, despite the explicit language of section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in public office,” Reich wrote on April 24 in the British newspaper The Guardian:
The reason for the disqualification clause is that someone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States cannot be trusted to use constitutional methods to regain office. (Notably, all three branches of the federal government have described the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an “insurrection”.)
Can any of us who saw (or have learned through the painstaking work of the January 6 committee) what Trump tried to do to overturn the results of the 2020 election have any doubt he will once again try to do whatever necessary to regain power, even if illegal and unconstitutional?
Reich also suggested that Trump may steal the 2024 election: “what if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? What if he gets them to prevent people likely to vote for Joe Biden from voting at all?”
To save democracy, Reich urged election officials to block Trump from appearing on the ballot: “Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states. Secretaries of state – who in most cases are in charge of deciding who gets on the ballot – must refuse to place Donald Trump’s name on the 2024 ballot, based on the clear meaning of section three of the 14th amendment to the US constitution.”
Reich has argued that the Democratic Party is too moderate, and tolerates too much internal dissent against big-government policies. He earlier argued that Democratic senators should have slapped Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema for opposing the elimination of the filibuster, which made it impossible for Democrats to pass trillions of dollars in tax hikes and news spending, limiting spending increases under Biden to less than $4 trillion. Sinema has since left the Democratic Party to become a liberal-leaning independent who continues to vote for Democratic control of the Senate. Reich’s outrage was shared by a former Obama administration official who said on a broadcast that Sinema was “a cunt” for not abolishing the filibuster.
Sinema has been the target of progressive harassment for her political positions before, including at Arizona State University, where she teaches social work courses. A group of illegal aliens followed her into the bathroom to demand that she support President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and amnesty.
Today, many Democratic Senators like Dick Durbin claim the filibuster is a “threat to democracy” and a vestige of Jim Crow. This is directly the opposite of what they claimed in the past, when the Senate had a Republican majority. Back then, Democratic Senators claimed the filibuster was a wise legacy of the Founding Fathers, a critical check-and-balance needed to prevent one-party rule, and that the filibuster was necessary to prevent parties and administrations from overreaching. As FactCheck.Org notes, back in 2018, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin defended the filibuster, claiming getting rid of the filibuster “would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our Founding Fathers.”
As a lawyer and Trump critic notes, during “the filibuster/nuclear option fight in 2006…the press was incredibly sympathetic to the Reid/Durbin/Schumer line that the filibuster was the crown jewel of our Republic, even as they applied it in a novel and unprecedented way.” Today, of course, Senators like Durbin and Schumer take just the opposite position, and hardly anyone in the press calls out this inconsistency.
Reich has also argued that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter could lead to despotism by opening the floodgates to dangerous viewpoints. An open internet with free debate is “dangerous rubbish,” Reich wrote. An open internet “is the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth,” he said.
