Jamie Raskin said Trump must be 'disqualified' by Congress if elected

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told a group at Washington DC bookstore Politics and Prose that it is up to Congress to disqualify Donald Trump from the election 2024 on January 6, 2025. The comments came before the Supreme Court ruled that states could not take Trump off the ticket in the election using the 14th Amendment. 

Raskin suggested that if SCOTUS rejected the case against Trump, that the responsibility to disqualify Trump from the election would fall to Congress. The comments from Raskin came during the group meeting in February, per Legal Insurrection: "The court is not going to save us. And so that means the only thing that really works is people in motion amending the Constitution — but again, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because what can be put in the Constitution can slip away from you very quickly."

"And the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes is Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which they’re just disappearing with a magic wand, as if it doesn’t exist, even though it could not be clearer what it’s stating. And so they want to kick it to Congress, so it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified."

Raskin added, "And then we need bodyguards for everybody, and civil war conditions, all because the nine justices — not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection — simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great Fourteenth Amendment means."

The Democratic congressman suggested that the steps could be taken, even at the risk of "civil war conditions" afterward. Section three of the 14th Amendment was adopted after the Civil War in order to bar former Confederate officials from holding public office in the Union.

The amendment reads, "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."