Robert B. Reich was Bill Clinton’s labor secretary; since then he has been keeping busy teaching at Berkeley and gracing us all with his punditry on Twitter, where he has a million and a half followers. Reich has become notorious for his unhinged far-Left rants; on Monday, he showed yet again why he has gained a reputation as an upscale Keith Olbermann. In the UK’s neo-Stalinist Guardian, Reich called for Donald Trump to be barred from running for president again — to preserve what Leftists love to call “our democracy,” by which they mean their hegemony.
Why should the current Republican front-runner be barred from running? Reich says it’s because he “committed treason just over two years ago.” Reich complains that 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.”
The Fourteenth Amendment does indeed bar from the presidency, as well as from Congress, anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” It was adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, so as to prevent Southern states from sending former Confederates to represent them in Washington, and has become quite popular among Democrats today as a means they have tried to use to disqualify Republicans who don’t think the 2020 election was entirely free of chicanery.
Yet as beloved as this scenario is on the Left, and as often as Leftist talking heads repeat it on CNN and MSNBC, there are major problems with it.
One is that the claim that Trump “engaged in insurrection against the United States” is a Leftist talking point, not a fact. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, were studied minute by minute during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and then again by the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Neither one resulted in Trump being charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it. Now, Merrick Garland’s appallingly corrupt and politicized “Justice” Department could change that at any moment, but after Tucker Carlson’s video footage exploded the Left’s Jan. 6 narrative, that case became exponentially harder to make.
Not only has Trump not been charged with or convicted of treason or insurrection, but no one else has, either. It’s a strange insurrection indeed, as it’s wholly lacking in insurrectionists. In fact, there was no insurrection at all on Jan. 6. Yet Reich presents Trump’s treason and the Jan. 6 “insurrection” as if they were both obvious and universally accepted, and wants him barred accordingly. Reich, in other words, wants to destroy our embattled republic completely in order to protect us from a man who supposedly committed treason against that republic.
The authoritarian Reich issues a demand: “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.” Unfortunately, despite the weakness of Reich’s case, it’s all too easy to envision far-Left secretaries of state in deep-blue states doing precisely this, creating a new Constitutional crisis in a nation where too few elected officials already respect the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold and protect.
Related: Just How Many Feds Were Among the Jan. 6 ‘Insurrectionists’?
With no sense of irony whatsoever, Reich quoted Trump himself: “‘In 2016, I declared I am your voice,’ Trump said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a line he repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few weeks later. ‘Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.’” Reich apparently hopes that his hapless readers will feel a chill down their spine as they read those words, and become all the more determined to prevent the hated Trump from returning to the Oval Office.
Reich doesn’t seem to realize that Trump was presenting himself as “justice” and “retribution” precisely as opposed to people like Robert B. Reich: arrogant, self-righteous authoritarians who don’t believe in the freedom of speech or in the idea of allowing his political foes to have their say. In Reich’s perfect world, only Leftists such as himself would be allowed to voice their opinions in the public forum. Our republic does need saving, but not so much from Trump as from Robert B. Reich.
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