Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has had some rather crazy ideas, but he communicated one of his most memorable ones yet in his Monday op-ed for The Guardian. "Trump committed treason and will try again. He must be barred from running," his headline declares. You can pretty much hear the desperate shouting in his voice. That idea, as Reich ultimately shares, is for secretaries of state to refuse to put former and potentially future President Trump on the ballot.
While Reich doesn't reveal his final plan until the closing paragraphs, it's a doozy worth reading until the end for. "Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states," he mentions in the penultimate paragraph. "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 writes to finish his piece.
Before eventually getting to that point, Reich is hysterical and fired up in other ways as he rants and raves throughout about Trump's reaction to losing the 2020 election.
As Reich put it, Trump "got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted." He goes on to write that such "is treason."
One would think that Democrats in the House of Representatives never objected to presidential election results, even though they have done so before, including with Trump's 2016 election. Further, while Trump was impeached for such actions, his trial in the Senate did not take place until after he had already left office and he was acquitted.
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This includes Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who actually bragged about objecting to the results on his official website. Raskin was one of the members of the January 6 select committee, which, as Reich refers to, did "painstaking work."
"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 wonders.
Reich also references another idea, and he's actually not the only one to mention it as a real possibility. There's a bunch of Democrats who seem obsessed with using a section of the 14th Amendment to go after Trump--and a few other duly-elected Republicans--to claim that they're traitors and therefore shouldn't be allowed to hold office.
Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) introduced legislation last December that, if passed, would prevent Trump from holding office again.
House Democrats Introduce Bill to Prevent Trump from Holding Office Again https://t.co/rh3u2VZwjF
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 16, 2022
Reich's hysteria is also particularly noticeable in such a part of his op-ed:
But 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?
What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote?
What if, despite all of this, Biden still wins the election but Trump gets more than 20% of Republican senators and House members to object to slates of electors pledged to Biden, and pushes the election into the House where Trump has a majority of votes?
Does anyone doubt the possibility – no, the probability – of any or all of this happening?
Trump tried these tactics once. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government.
Yes, a lot of people actually do doubt it, especially that it would be a "probability."
In fact, if anything, such desperation may only further embolden Trump and his supporters to enable him to prevail in the Republican primary and beyond to winning the general election.
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