Look at the image above. Someone posted it on BlueSky the other day. I imagine it's been shared quite a bit since then.

Seriously, this is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever seen! I don't know if it's the stupidest, but it certainly makes the top five.

Let's unpack this, shall we?

First, the time to bitch and scream and make a huge push about the 14th Amendment was way back during the primaries. But we didn't push hard enough. Yes, some of us did say something, and a couple of states even succeeded in temporarily ruling Trump off of the ballot, but the hyper-biased, not-so-Supreme Court struck that down. Democrats then went absolutely docile as they so often inappropriately do.

And then we basically did nothing. It seems to be what we do best.

A bunch of us (including me) complained loudly about this, but nobody actually did anything about it. (You should have listened to me - again.) Yet now, long after the election has been called, and Kamala has conceded, NOW we're going to dig in our heels!? Two whole YEARS after we should have done this!? Come on!

Now, let me quickly qualify that from a legal standpoint, the 14th Amendment DOES rule out Trump from taking office. It always did! It not only bars those who engaged in insurrection against the United States from holding office, it also bars those who give "aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." In other words, even if you can somehow argue that Trump technically didn't actually engage in insurrection outright, it simply cannot be denied that Trump gave aid and comfort to the January 6th rioters! That's undeniable! So he IS ruled out! Democrats who want this interpretation enforced are 110% correct.

But we missed our opportunity, damn it. Democrats should have sued to bar Trump in 2023, and even our current right-wing-biased SCOTUS wouldn't be able to argue around it. The language of the Amendment is clear. This should have been the Big Push. It really should also have been the #1 news feature over the last two years, and it should have been hammered upon viewers over and over again. (With a sane news media, it would have been.) People should have been questioning Trump, in every debate and every news interview, even and especially on Fox News, "Sir, even if you win, you can't take office. So why are you even bothering?" But no, the mass delusion went on, unchecked. The rule was ignored, for years, in clear violation of the Constitution. Trump won 49.9% of the vote, which was more than Kamala Harris got by a mere fraction, and swept all the swing states for the Electoral College.

We blew it. Not because Kamala ran a bad campaign, but because we didn't press our legal advantage. (And also let the right-wing misinformation media run unchecked, of course.)

And we're going to bitch NOW!? Long after Kamala's thrown in the towel? We're going to say that if the referee didn't call the foul in the first 10 minutes, that we would have somehow won the game?

Holy shit. I mean, if... dog... rabbit.

Seriously, enforcing the 14th Amendment now, long after the point at which we should have done so, will absolutely trigger nationwide pandemonium! MAGA-nutballs will be rioting everywhere, complaining loudly that the goalposts had been moved, and their guy was wrongfully being deposed.

And, for once, they would be correct. We let it slide for way, WAY too long! Our inaction created the new precedent (and president!). Enforcing the law now, no matter how just it may be, will look and sound less like a proper application of the Constitution, and more like sour grapes.

More importantly (and I cannot stress this enough), an impossibly unlikely success in applying the 14th Amendment now would oust Trump and almost certainly make J.D. Vance the goddamned president! And Vance is 1000 times worse than Trump! He has all of Trump's extremism, none of the dementia, none of the magnanimity, and he's young and competent! If you liken Trump to L. Ron Hubbard, Vance is David Miscavige!

We do NOT want to go down that road!

And then there's the fiscal stupidity of it all. At exactly the moment when Democrats need the most support, the most financial backing, and the most aggressive off-season campaigning, we're going to cut the money off?!

Yeah, yeah, I know, there's too much money in politics already, but you can bet your ass the Republican oligarchs aren't going to stop their contributions one damned bit! And while Democrats see their war-chests empty, Republicans will be laughing all the way to the bank! This is exactly like telling an army: "You're not going to receive any food rations until you defeat the enemy!" As if starving your own fighting force could ever win anything!

This is so stupid, it's Trump-level stupid. It's MAGA-Bubble-World stupid. It could only work if we had a media machine with the size and reach of the conservative propaganda-disguised-as-news. But we don't. That's territory currently held entirely by MAGA nutballs. And besides, we don't want news biased in our favor! We want unbiased news!

And we can't even reach that low bar.

As liberals, we tend to swim desperately after the ship long after its set sail. We're doing so now, and in an embarrassingly stupid way.

In the meantime, I hear Syria is drafting a new constitution. Maybe they can have ours?

We're not using it.

Eric

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