Section 3: The Quickest & Easiest Way to Remove Trump From Office (a Q&A)

Section 3: The Quickest & Easiest Way to Remove Trump From Office (a Q&A)

One simple majority vote in *either* chamber, and out he goes. Yes, it really is that easy (at least in theory). Yes, it really is perfectly constitutional.

Today is the most consequential midterm Election Day since 1866, if not ever. But even if we win the midterms—which is no certainty, given that Donald Trump and his treasonous collaborators are moving Heaven, Earth, and Nicki Minaj’s posterior to remain in power—then what? What’s the plan?

Even a “Blue Tsunami” won’t wash Trump away. The reality is, no matter what happens in the next 24 hours, he’s still set to occupy the Oval Office for another 809 days. That’s plenty of time for him to detonate both a nuclear bomb in Tehran and the global economy, swap out Sam Alito with Aileen Cannon, sic ICE on anyone he deems “Antifa,” turn all of D.C. into a Nazi office park, allow his Silicon Valley oligarchs to gobble up what remains of the independent media, simp even harder for Vladimir Putin, mismanage another pandemic, build condos on our national parks, continue his campaign of plunder, and kick the can containing the Epstein Files down the road yet again.

This isn’t sustainable. We won’t survive two more years of this. We have to, we must, remove him—stat. We need a plan—a real plan, a proper plan, a plan that doesn’t involve prayers, blood clots, actuarial tables, and Peter Thiel puppet and professional asshole JD Vance taking the oath of office.

The Democratic leadership, so called, has proved incapable of implementing such a plan. Hakeem Jeffries, the man who would be Speaker, is out there holding covert meetings about God knows what with Jared Kushner, our unelected shadow president; Chuck Schumer thinks it’s still 1996 and no one remembers the time he went to Roy Cohn’s birthday party at Studio 54; and even Kamala Harris, of all people, just said that “going in the direction of impeachment is not a good idea…because we have limited resources and I think the energy and the resources need to put into accountability, need to be put into investigations.”

Yikes. To my jaded ears, that all sounds like Merrick Garland’s music—the white-towel waltz, the controlled-opposition cantata, the sad song of surrender. Meanwhile, the Senator who seems to best understand the gravity of the situation, and hasn’t been shy about saying so— Chris Murphy of Connecticut—just suffered an ill-timed stroke.

If recent history is any indication, we can guess at what happens next. Assuming the new Democratic members of Congress receive certification and are sworn in at all—there’s no guarantee of that, alas—we will see the usual concerted good-faith effort to work with the Trump Administration (which will go about as well as all those “resets” with Donald’s boss Putin), and performative speeches whenever a Kash Patel or Todd Blanche is hauled before a Congressional subcommittee, and a great many passionate tweets. Maybe by this time next year they’ll have managed to impeach Pete Hegseth.

That’s not enough to save our democracy. Not this time.

So what will save our democracy, smart guy?

I’m glad you asked.

In that interview, Kamala Harris suggested that impeachment was a waste of effort because the GOP Senators would never remove him. “Remember, I was in the Senate for the last go-around,” she said, “and the votes aren’t there.”

She’s not wrong about the math. We ain’t getting two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict him. There are too many Tommy Tubervilles and Ron Johnsons and Josh Hawleys. Not only that, but disgraced Chief Justice John Roberts, who is so far up Trump’s ass you need a gastroenterologist to take his photo, would preside yet again over the Senate trial—calling balls and strikes, as he mendaciously puts it.

Kamala’s right. Impeachment is a waste of time.

How about the 25th Amendment?

Please. You really think JD Vance and that Cabinet of sycophants would dare?

Then we’re stuck with him.

Not at all!

What if I were to tell you that there is another way, a third way, to remove Trump from office? And that it’s quicker and easier than impeachment or the 25th Amendment? And that the Democrats could do it even if they only win one of the two chambers—because all it requires is a simple majority vote in the House or the Senate?

One simple majority vote in either the House or the Senate, and out he goes?

That’s what I said.

It really is that easy?

It really is. At least, in theory.

And it’s in the Constitution?

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, baby. Learn in, live it, love it.

I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, otherwise known as the Disqualification Clause, states, unequivocally, that any person who has engaged in insurrection against the United States, or has given aid or comfort to insurrectionists, is disqualified from holding office—unless both the House and the Senate vote, by a two-thirds majority, to waive the prohibition and allow him or her to serve.

Absent that two-thirds majority in both House and Senate, insurrectionists are ineligible to be President. Period, full stop. Donald Trump engaged in the January 6th insurrection, and, further, gave aid and comfort to the insurrectionists by pardoning all of them. Therefore, under the express written law of the United States, he is disqualified from holding office.

Disqualified?

Yep. Like Karl-Anthony Towns picking up his sixth foul.

But isn’t it fishy, to disqualify someone from being president?

No. We do it all the time.

Zohran Mamdani is disqualified from being president, because he was born in Uganda. Arnold Schwarzenegger is disqualified from being president, because he was born in Austria. Billie Eilish and Jaxson Dart are disqualified from being president, because they’re not yet 25 years old. And so on.

Furthermore, Donald Trump is well aware of the reasons for presidential disqualification. He kept up the ugly and racist “Barack Obama was born in Kenya” lie was because he knew that, if it were actually true, Obama would have been disqualified. In other words, he promulgated that lie because he sought to question Obama’s legitimacy. It’s right and proper that we should question Trump’s.

Is Donald Trump an illegitimate president?

I would argue that he is, yes. I suspect Congress will agree.

And if he is found to be illegitimate, it means that everything he’s done in his second term—every Cabinet appointment, every judicial appointment, and every military appointment…every deal with a foreign nation, every executive order, and every pardon—is null and void, under the Constitution.

If either House or Senate vote not to allow him to serve, it all goes away, like a bad dream.

You’re kidding.

There are a lot of jokes in this piece. That ain’t one of them.

How did you come up with this?

What I am proposing here regarding Section 3 is not my idea. Nor is it new.

Four years ago, ABC News reported, that two organizations, Free Speech For People and Mi Familia Vota, were “launching a campaign via TrumpIsDisqualified.org to urge secretaries of state and other chief elections officials to bar the former president from running for office under the section of the 14th Amendment known as the disqualification clause.”

A year and a half later, two prominent conservative legal scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” wrote a 700-page analysis on the clause and its application to Trump, published in February 2024 by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

I first heard of Section 3 from Kaitlyn Byrd—GothamGirlBlue—in her brilliant piece, “Sunday Reading List: The 14th Amendment Still Exists,” published on November 24, 2024. I included her idea in my proposed “Dark Brandon Godfather Moves” a few weeks later. Again—in 2024.

I wrote:

The Senate Democrats need to stop Chuck Schumering already and make this happen. Do exactly what Byrd suggests! There’s absolutely nothing to lose—other than, you know, American democracy.

Needless to say, the Senate Democrats did not, and have not, stopped Chuck Schumering.¹ And in a related story, American democracy is on life support.

Why have I never heard of this?

You’re not the only one. Most of the friends I’ve told about this had never heard of it, either. As of this writing, Section 3 remains one of the more arcane sections of the Constitution—probably because in the United States, we don’t generally have issues involving insurrections.

I wrote a long piece about Section 3 in January of this year, hoping to get the word out, but for whatever reason, the post never took off. Hopefully, this attempt will get more eyeballs.

Wait a second—why didn’t the Democrats invoke Section 3 when they had the chance?

Well, Rep. David Cicilline tried. Remember him? Democrat from Rhode Island? Was one of the official prosecutors of the second impeachment? He was always reliably clear-eyed when it came to Trump. In December of 2022—two years before I became aware of Section 3—he introduced legislation that would have barred Donald from ever holding office again.

“Donald Trump very clearly engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 with the intention of overturning the lawful and fair results of the 2020 election. You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy,” Cicilline wrote.² “The Fourteenth Amendment makes clear that based on his past behavior, Donald Trump is disqualified from ever holding federal office again and, under Section 3, Congress has the power to pass legislation to implement this prohibition.”

The bill had 40 co-sponsors in the House.³

And what happened to that bill?

It never made it to the floor.

What?!? Why not?

Nancy Pelosi was House Speaker at the time. You have to check with her. But my guess it, she killed the bill for the same reason she declined to impeach Trump after the release of the Mueller Report. She didn’t think she could sell it to the American people. She didn’t really grasp the threat.

Those were both catastrophic blunders—in the moment, some of us believed, and certainly in hindsight.

And Cicilline?

He left Congress six months later to head up the Rhode Island Foundation. One can only bang one’s head against a wall so many times.

So Section 3 isn’t a new concept?

Only if you think something written in 1868 is new.

What was happening in 1868? How did Section 3 come to be?

In the days after the Civil War, some of the Southern states wanted to send back to Washington elected officials who’d been active participants in the Confederacy. The Union was loath to let bygones be bygones and allow every last traitor back into the Capitol; we were smarter back then. So Congress wrote a codicil into the Fourteenth Amendment, granting itself the right to determine, on a case by case basis, whether a former Confederate could return to the fold.

This is the full text of Section 3, aka the Disqualification Clause:

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.

Eliminate all the verbiage that doesn’t apply to Donald, and you get this:

No person shall…hold any office…under the United States…who, having previously taken an oath…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.

That’s pretty straightforward, if you ask me: Trump has a “disability,” and Congress has to vote on whether to remove it.

Give me an example.

Sure. Let’s say I’m Cletus Mitchell, a former Confederate military officer from Mobile, and that the people of Alabama have elected me to the Senate in 1868. Because of my affiliation with the insurrectionists, I’m not legally allowed to serve unless two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate give their blessing.

That’s a tall order, to be sure—and it should be, because we’re talking about a bunch of stinking traitors. But in many cases, people like Cletus Mitchell did get the requisite votes and were able to take their seats.

And this is still on the books?

The Trump regime has effectively quashed the First, Second, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments; brazenly announced it will ignore the Twenty-Second; and wants to also dispose of the Eighth, the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth, and, oh yes, the Nineteenth. And the John Roberts Court is happy to give Trump whatever he wants, within reason.

Even so, this law is still very much on the books. As Kaitlyn Byrd put it, “The Fourteenth Amendment still exists.” And Section 3 is not exclusive to Civil War leaders. It means that anyone who engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States and the United States Constitution is forbidden from holding a federal political office unless they get special permission.

Wait—why doesn’t Section 3 come up more often? Like, why didn’t the Republicans use it to remove Bill Clinton?

Because Bill Clinton incited an erection, not an insurrection.

But Trump did.

Indeed. Donald Trump, you may recall, led an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump, you may also recall, was not authorized by a two-thirds vote in either chamber to “remove such disability.” Which means that Donald Trump is not, and has not been since two weeks before he left office the first time, eligible to serve as POTUS.

That’s just, like, your opinion, man. And you’re not even a lawyer.

Correct. I did not even go to law school and am not an attorney. So don’t take my word for it; listen instead to Baude and Paulsen (boldface mine):

The core events [surrounding efforts to overturn the result of the presidential election of 2020] are familiar to all—the dishonest attempts to set aside valid state election results with false claims of voter fraud; the attempted subversion of the constitutional processes for States’ selection of electors for President and Vice President; the efforts to have the Vice President unconstitutionally claim a power to refuse to count electoral votes certified and submitted by several States; the efforts of Members of Congress to assert a similar power to reject votes lawfully cast by electors; the fomenting and immediate incitement of a mob to attempt to forcibly prevent Congress’s and the Vice President’s counting of such lawfully cast votes—all in an attempt to prevent the defeated incumbent President, Donald Trump, from losing power in accordance with the Constitution. This was undoubtedly a serious assault on the American constitutional order. Not since the Civil War has there been so serious a threat to the foundations of the American constitutional republic. It takes little imagination to describe the efforts to maintain Trump in office, notwithstanding his defeat, as an attempted political coup d’état. These actions culminated in the incitement and execution of a violent uprising at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—an “insurrection” aimed at preventing Congress and the incumbent Vice President from performing their constitutional responsibilities to count the votes for President and Vice President in the 2020 election. Several of the people involved in these events—most notably, the defeated President, Donald Trump—had previously taken oaths to support the Constitution. If they engaged in or gave aid and comfort to an insurrection against the constitutional government, Section Three would appear to bar them from holding office again.

And they wrote that before Trump issued blanket pardons for the J6 insurrectionists, which, it seems to me, is an incontrovertible example of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Members of Congress do not disagree. “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” said a prominent Senator during the second impeachment. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

This wise Senator added: “He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored. No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.”

Which Senator said that? No, wait, let me guess: Sheldon Whitehouse?

Nope.

Kamala Harris?

Wrong again.

Elizabeth Warren?

Not even close. Those words were uttered by one Addison Mitchell McConnell III of Kentucky—otherwise known as Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s longtime Senate Majority Leader.

Wow. And the rest of Congress?

Congress did not proclaim Trump’s innocence during the second impeachment. They all held with Mitch McConnell on the subject. As Byrd argues,

Congress already determined that Trump was an insurrectionist disqualified from the ballot — via impeachment.

It went so quickly that few of us remember what happened; I still have to pull up the videos on CSPAN to catch up myself. But bipartisan majorities in both chambers agreed that Donald Trump had incited an insurrection. It fell short of impeachment, itself a 2/3 majority limit in the Senate, but that’s not the rule, is it? It’s that Congress agrees as a body that an officer of the United States has engaged in insurrection and is disqualified to hold any future office. And in that sense, the impeachment and the trial vote do precisely that.

But wait! There’s more! She continues:

None of the defenses offered for the “not guilty” votes were that Donald Trump was innocent. There was the fact that he was no longer in office; there were questions about the Constitutionality of the Senate trial; there were calls for him to face criminal charges instead of political ones; there were people who said that the trial was a distraction from important pandemic response. But every single Republican Senator agreed that the events of January 6th were an insurrection. The only question was whether they would (or could) hold Trump accountable for it.

Needless to say, they did not hold him accountable, because the Senate GOP is nothing but a sorry lot of poltroons and traitors more suited to serve in the Ninth Circle of Hell than the Capitol. But they also didn’t absolve Trump of being an insurrectionist. Because they couldn’t. Because he is one.

What about the courts?

Well, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with this assessment, ordering the Colorado Secretary of State to remove Trump’s name from the 2024 ballots, on the grounds that he was ineligible.

This made Donald lose his shit—because he feared the jig was up. A legal battle ensued. The case was fast-tracked to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in its March 2024 Trump v. Anderson decision, unanimously reversed the ruling—but not for the usual cowardly, corrupt John Roberts reasons:

A group of Colorado voters contends that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits former President Donald J. Trump, who seeks the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party in this year’s election, from becoming President again. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed with that contention. It ordered the Colorado secretary of state to exclude the former President from the Republican primary ballot in the State and to disregard any write-in votes that Colorado voters might cast for him.

Former President Trump challenges that decision on several grounds. Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.

Basically, SCOTUS let Trump off on a technicality:

This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.

Which, okay, fine, whatever. The House and the Senate are not beholden to the “States.” Fair enough.

I’m sure Roberts and Company gave Trump some sort of workaround in that decision, though. A little clue on what to do. They like to do that.

There is no workaround, because Section 3 is so black-and-white.

There is a lot of chatter in the Trump v. Anderson decision about legal precedent, about the Enforcement Act of 1870, about the delineation of what powers belong to a state and what powers belong to the federal government, and about—as Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson explain in their concurrence—“novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner”—that is, Donald Trump—“from future controversy.”

But nowhere does the Court say, or even suggest, that Donald Trump is not guilty of insurrection against the United States. To the contrary. As Kaitlin Byrd notes,

the Court was presented an argument for innocence in the Trump v. Anderson case where they made up their very terrible rules. Trump’s lawyers argued that Section 3 does not apply. The Court did not even touch it. The key aspect of the entire decision, in fact, supports the idea that Section 3 is valid and does apply, and as such, states cannot implement any efforts to enforce it. That’s for Congress alone to determine.

Roberts and Alito and Thomas are the same goose-stepping bootlickers who gave Donald absolute immunity for “official acts.” If they could have gotten away with declaring Trump innocent of leading an insurrection, don’t you think Justice Fond-of-Flags and Justice My-Wife-Helped-Finance-J6 would have done so?

Instead, they didn’t even try.

So how does this Section 3 plan work?

Easy-peasy. Three simple steps:

1. Both House and Senate draft a bill to offer Donald Trump amnesty—to “remove such disability” of his having instigated a violent insurrection—as mandated by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

2. Bring the bills to a vote.

3. If Trump fails to secure the requisite two-thirds majority vote to absolve him in either chamber, he is disqualified to serve as the President of the United States and must vacate the White House immediately.

Holy shit. Could you imagine?

I can. Because I have a very active imagination. There’s not enough ketchup in the world. Donald will literally lose his shit. Natalie will have to give him a horse tranquilizer.

Walk me through it step-by-step. Let’s play it out.

Sure thing.

1/ Draft the Amnesty Bill

This must happen in both the House and the Senate. But here’s the catch: the bill should offer amnesty to Donald Trump and to JD Vance—under the argument that, by knowingly abetting the administration of an ineligible insurrectionist, who is continuing the J6 insurrection by his illegal activities as POTUS in the second term, Vance has “given aid or comfort to the enemies,” and thus also requires Congressional sanction to “remove such disability.”

2/ Vote on the Amnesty Bill

This is easy to bring to the floor, if the Dems control either the House or the Senate or both. Trump won’t get the requisite two-thirds majority to absolve him—in either chamber, let alone both.

And then what?

Here’s the beauty part: As soon as the final tally is in, poof, the traitors will not longer be in office. It’s instantaneous. Now you see ‘em, now you don’t. Trump is no longer the president, Vance is no longer the vice president, and, as I said before, everything he’s done in his second term—every Cabinet appointment, every judicial appointment, and every military appointment…every deal with a foreign nation, every executive order, and every pardon—is null and void, under the Constitution.

So who becomes interim president?

The Speaker of the House. Which means the Dems must win the House, so get out and vote today, please. And also, they must elect a Speaker who does not take secret meetings with Jared Kushner. Hakeem Jeffries would be a vast improvement over Trump, but I’d much rather have Jamie Raskin, or Robert Garcia, or my Representative, Pat Ryan—or, if we really want the GOP’s collective heads to explode, we can go with AOC.

Couldn’t they also elect someone not in the House to be Speaker?

Yes, they can. And in this scenario, they probably should.

A year ago, in the most-read piece in the seven year history of PREVAIL, I proposed Liz Cheney. Mark Milley would probably get strong bipartisan support. But if the Dems win the House, we don’t need to draft a Republican. Get Pete Buttigieg on the phone; I suspect he’s available.

The #Liz48 Plan: This Is How We Remove Them—Legally, Quickly, and Nonviolently

Greg Olear

October 21, 2025

Read full story

Trump will not go quietly.

Correct. And this is the danger. If this all comes to pass, Trump will go ballistic. He will scream bloody murder, yowl for the Supreme Court to save him, order an invasion of Nuuk or a nuclear strike on Tehran. And his lickspittles—Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, Little Marco, Natalie, Laura Loomer, whoever—will soothe him by telling him, falsely, that he’s still in charge.

But he won’t be. At that point, the Joint Chiefs would be under no obligation to follow orders from him, from Pete Hegseth, or from Pete Hegseth’s wife. Not only that, but if Trump makes like his criminal buddy Bibi at Beit Aghion and refuses to leave the White House, the generals can literally call in the Delta Force to Maduro him.

Because at that point, Trump would have no more right to be in the Oval Office than you or I. And how can he even argue? If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that, when it comes to matters involving the eviction of squatters, he’s staunchly pro-landlord.

Oh, snap!

But seriously, what about Vance? He could more plausibly make a case that he is still eligible.

Yeah, Vance will grouse about how he is the rightful successor, because he’s not an insurrectionist, blah blah blah. His supporters will gather round him—but there’s so few of them, they can comfortably fit on the sectional display in the showroom of your local Raymour & Flanigan. Seriously, do we trust this guy…

…to clean up the mess? Miss me with that.

The only U.S. residents lobbying hard for Vance will be sweaty fascist Peter Thiel, Dark Enlightenment guru Curtis Yarvin, the Widow Kirk, his fellow sleazebag Ohioan Vivek Ramaswamy, and maybe another stray Nazi or three. Claimants to the throne have to have a constituency, and Vance doesn’t have one. Because he’s not a serious person. So: au revoir, baiseur de la canapé.

You really think this can work?

Absolutely. The important thing here is: Popular opinion will be on our side—resoundingly. The American people hate these schmucks. We’re embarrassed by them. We’re sick to death of them. We want them gone. There will be neither general strikes nor mass protests if Trump is declared ineligible under Section 3, I assure you. The only thing people will be doing in the street is dancing.

And that’s vital.

The Berlin Wall didn’t fall because the head of the East German government signed some big law authorizing it; it fell because enough people wanted it to fall, so when a low-level functionary on the scene gave his consent, it was too late to stop the wall from coming down.

Yeah, but this isn’t East Germany.

Putin seems to think it is.

I’m serious.

Bush v. Gore wasn’t a good ruling, in terms of legal precedent. Rehnquist & Co. pulled it out of their collective ass, basically. And what happened? Bush became president regardless, because enough Americans, Gore included, decided that the Supreme Court’s decision was legit.

Legitimacy is everything.

“The regime will fall when it loses legitimacy, which happens when people withdraw their legitimacy from it,” says the organizer Jake Schlachter, co-founder of the Democracy Teams Initiative. “If a large majority of independents demands removal, I think there’s a good chance it happens. What is stopping people from demanding removal now is believing that it’s impossible.”

I’m here to tell you: it’s not impossible.

Won’t John Roberts shoot it all down?

If Congress buys in, and the military buys in, and the governors of the blue states and some of the red ones buy in, and the creative community buys in, and (enough of) the legacy media buys in, and the American people visibly and clearly buy in, no one’s going to listen to the Supreme Court when they finally get around to hearing the case next term and start clucking about the weird precedents they just made up and inserted into Trump v. Anderson or “well-actually”-ing about Vance. If SCOTUS issues a decision in the forest, and no one bothers to listen, does it still make a noise?

But the Court wouldn’t dare reverse it. Not at that point. Roberts may be a fascist white supremacist anti-voting-rights piece of shit, but he’s also a yellow-bellied coward who wants to keep his job. He caved on Obamacare, when he saw which way the wind was blowing; he’ll cave on this.

Heck, he’s already starting to chicken out. Yesterday, the Court tossed Trump’s injunction in the case involving voter rolls in California:

“With no public dissents (and without even calling for a response), #SCOTUS *denies* the Trump administration’s emergency application in the California voter roll case,” wrote legal scholar and law professor Steve Vladeck. “And no, I cannot remember *any* prior case in which the Court denied a DOJ application without even calling for a response. That’s an even bigger ‘go away’ than the lack of (public) dissents.” (By “go away,” he really means “fuck off.”)

Besides: if our Section 3 plan gets that far, we’ve already won.

If this happened, it would be…I’m struggling to find the words.

It would restore your faith in humanity, in the Constitution, in the inherent goodness of the American people, in the triumph of love over hate?

Yes, all of that. But we would not be out of the woods.

That’s true. The new president would have to hurriedly undo as much of the Donald damage as possible, before the totalitarian cancer spreads even further.

Abolish ICE. Make Jack Smith Attorney General. Release the Epstein Files. Send major military aid to Ukraine, call up the European leaders and beg for forgiveness, “discombobulate” the Kremlin—and the next time Bibi Netanyahu shows his smug-ass face on U.S. soil, arrest that butcher and send him to The Hague.

Hire a special counsel to hold Nuremberg-style trials to sort through the criminality of Trump and his cronies. Convict Elon Musk and Jared Kushner and seize their assets. Enact legislation to make sure nothing like this ever happens here again.

Now you’re talkin’!

But to get to that point, we must demand that Congress do its job on Section 3. Cicilline’s bill is presumably still kicking around; just dust it off, mark it up, and vote on it.

Section 3 matters, because Section 3 is the law of the land. We must all call on Congress—loudly and relentlessly—to settle the matter once and for all, and bring Trump’s presidential eligibility to a vote.

Remember: If two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate do not vote to allow him to remain, he is officially disqualified—and he must vacate at once.

Okay but…what if it doesn’t work?

There’s always the chance it won’t. But it’s certainly worth trying, given the alternatives, no?

If you took some poison, and I offered you an antidote that was effective 95 percent of the time, would you decline the offer because it didn’t always cure you? Or would you guzzle the contents of the vial and hope for the best?

You convinced me. What can I do to support this effort?

Call your House reps. Call your Senators. Write letters to your local papers. Post about Section 3 on social media. Tell everyone you know that this is a thing.

Don’t back down on Section 3. The only reason people aren’t demanding Section 3 is because not enough people know about Section 3. Awareness is power.

This is the way out.

It’s the only way out.

Let’s make it so.

Photo credit: Trump drawing by CHUNK.

© 2026 Greg Olear
PO Box 435, West Park, NY 12493