Congress To Do Constitutional Duty and Certify Election of Guy Barred from Office by Constitution

Democrats vow to certify victory of Trump, whose insurrection attempt disqualified him from holding federal office

Jan. 6: Congress to certify unconstitutional new president … Biden bans gallons of offshore drilling … Biden tells new congressional Democrats to make friends with the theocrats … Study proves Manchin fucked over the poors for bullshit …

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Vice Pres. Kamala Harris casts the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 6, 2022. (Screengrab / C-SPAN video.)

Congress meets today to certify formally the election of Donald John Trump to the presidency of the United States. In an interesting twist, Trump is barred from holding office by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which he will swear to uphold on Jan. 20 and which the members of Congress swore to uphold last week.

The 14th Amendment says:

“No person shall … 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 … 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.”

The amendment says how this office-holding requirement can be waived — with a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress. It doesn’t say how the not-holding-office is to be enforced, which means simply that it’s not allowed. Which means no one can facilitate said office-holding without violating the Constitution.

You Newsfuckers with memories might point out that the corrupt and corrupted right-wing, corporatist Supreme Court ruled that Congress must pass legislation to bar specific insurrectionists from office-holding. But did it?

Two lawyer types — with résumés that would have been impressive before Trump obviated résumés — wrote just after Christmas that the requirement for legislation was merely a suggestion for how the 14th Amendment might be upheld. And because the Constitution gives Congress sole power over vote-certifying, the Supreme Court doesn’t have shit to say about it — the high-on-their-own-supply court was asked only about state-level vote-certifying. Not about Congress.

And an organization called 14th Now has been staging protests in Washington to call attention to the fact that the Constitution bars Trump from holding, like, any office. As their website says, even using Trumpian capitalization, “Trump, an adjudicated insurrectionist, remains constitutionally DISQUALIFIED from assuming the presidency.”

Now, Democrats have been quite adamant about their fealty to the Constitution, and many have publicly acknowledged Trump’s insurrectile dysfunction. So how many have said they won’t vote to certify votes — not because the votes are invalid but because the candidate is? Newsfucker, it’s zero.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Semafor Democrats won’t object. “House Democrats are not election deniers,” Jeffries said. “That sentiment speaks for itself,” he added, even though that’s not a thing. And even though Democrats don’t swear not to be election deniers, they swear to uphold the Constitution.

And yet, when Democrats talk about upholding the Constitution today, they’re talking about certifying authentic vote counts — not about enabling a gross violation of the 14th Amendment. Not even the most America-hating, Allah-loving Muslim or Marx-loving Marxist Democrats are talking about voting against certification. And there’s a very simple reason: Because it’s not cool. Man.

The media would falsely play gotcha and accuse Democrats of election denialism. Republicans would lose their minds. And you can bet that the teacher’s pets in the Democratic establishment would click their tongues hard enough to bruise their palates.

At upholding the Constitution.

And, in fairness, coolness and deficits thereof are actually a wildly under-scrutinized element of our politics.

Three days after 9/11, voting to let the president do whatever the fuck he wanted with the military in the name of killing terrorists was the coolest thing around at least until the iPod came out two months later. It took years for scientists to measure the previously unrecorded levels of coolness in Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) being literally the only person to vote no.

And as recently as 2022 — when Pres. Joe Biden was just a snot-nosed, wet-behind-the-ears septuagenerian — upholding the 14th Amendment was cool! Lee was even a co-sponsor of a bill to bar Trump from holding office.

The bill was introduced by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), who said, “The 14th Amendment makes clear that based on his past behavior, Donald Trump is disqualified from ever holding federal office again and, under Section 5, Congress has the power to pass legislation to implement this prohibition.”

Cicilline and Lee are no longer in office. But the bill had forty co-sponsors and the ones still in office today will no doubt vote to certify votes that are constitutionally uncertifiable.

Now, in their defense, Democrats don’t have the votes to accomplish shit. And the coolness factor matters because it’s a reflection of public sentiment.

And there’s no massive wave of public sentiment for upholding the Constitution. Because, who’s got the fucking energy?

(Why didn’t the 14th Now movement take off? For one thing, even edgy media outlets with edgy names like “The Fucking News” didn’t bang the drum on this issue¹. Plus, people were dispirited as hell after the election. See below.)

And even if enough Democrats in just one chamber denied Republicans the two-thirds vote needed to waive the 14th Amendment, isn’t it possible that the Republican majorities would just shrug their shoulders and certify the election anyway? Pretty likely! And isn’t it likely that would violate the 14th Amendment requirement for two-thirds?

Newsfucker, it’s likely as fuck.

And wouldn’t Vice Pres. Kamala Harris certify Trump’s victory anyway, because at heart most Democrats just want to please the invisible high-school principal that haunts their every action, even if the principal wants them to violate the Constitution? Newsfucker, yes.

But the fact that Democrats can’t change shit today is a reason to vote against certification. It won’t cause a constitutional crisis because Democrats don’t have the votes.

But it would provide dramatic testimony that the oath to uphold the Constitution supersedes the cool factor. And it would provide the kind of example for future legislators and Americans that Barbara Lee gave us three days after the previous attack on the United States.

And if Democrats won’t talk about it today, all the more reason we should.

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Biden Low-Key Natural Gaslighting Us Now

Still-Pres. Joe Biden this morning announced a massive, permanent ban on offshore drilling in 625 million acres of U.S. oceans. It’s just one of many fuck-yous Biden is bequeathing his constitutionally barred successor.

Instead of upholding the 14th Amendment (as he swore to do) by refusing to let Donald Trump take office, Biden instead is handing Trump a batch of annoying shit. And unlike a lot of that annoying shit, Trump can’t undo this one.²

That’s because federal law gives presidents broad powers to eliminate federal territories from exploitation by Big Oil, but doesn’t give next presidents the power to un-eliminate them. (Especially if the next president is barred from office by the 14th Amendment.)

The Trump transition team complained about losing those acres. So did Big Oil. In response, of course, boo but also hoo.

And some reality checks here: Most oil companies don’t actually want to expand drilling. It’s expensive. And it can lower the cost of oil. Which they do not like.

And a number of coastal Republicans routinely oppose offshore drilling off their shore. So there’s little chance Trump will be able to get Congress to undo this.

Now, how is this gaslighting?

Because just yesterday, Biden held a reception for new congressional Democrats — mostly the younger ones elected to fucking fight — and urged them to, uh, make friends with Republicans.

Yes, the same Republicans that Democrats told us just last year were an existential threat to democracy. Biden told the new members, “The single greatest loss we have is that we don’t know each other anymore.”

Executive motherfucker, that’s not even the 47th single greatest loss we have. Try climate. Or the Supreme Court. Or the right to have a doctor take undifferentiated shit out of your uterus. We’ve got at least 99 problems, but not knowing misogynistic, racist, homophobic, theocratic, autocratic ignorami ain’t one.

And that, your humble TFN posits, is one reason so many are enervated right now. Because Democrats told us everything was on the line on Election Day, that a loss was a permanent, irreversible loss.³

Democratic voters (except Newsfuckers) were pre-conditioned that they’d be able to stop fighting the day after Election Day.

Of course, TFN pushed back against that Democratic absolutist maximalism, arguing that Election Day is just draft day and the real fight is every other day.

And, of course, the Democratic Party mantra was bullshit. It was bullshit that the fight ends Election Day but also that Trump = (Hitler + Satan) × Cthulhu. Or at least that they think that of him.

In an op-ed last night, urging us to remember how terrible Jan. 6 was, Biden also told us what he plans to do about the man who made Jan. 6 happen:

“I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon.”

So of course no one’s in fighting mode with leadership that can’t decide whether the enemy is Satan or a guest for tea and crumpets. But draft day is over and the real fight isn’t unthinking Resistance of reflexively opposing everything Trump-adjacent, it’s fighting for principles instead of leaders.

Let’s be done with fighting for leaders. Not when they whip us into panic-donating. Not when they vote to violate the 14th Amendment. Our leaders will get better when we do, holding firm to principle, demanding better representation, and refusing to be gaslit, no matter how cheap gas is.

Despite Absence from Senate, Manchin Still Earning Fuck Yous

Remember how then-Sen. Joe Manchin (D-then-I-WV) helped kill the expanded Child Tax Credit because he had a really, really strong feeling that parents would use the money to buy drugs? Because he hates the poors? It was the kind of uninformed, misanthropic, America-hating, knee-jerk bullshit that led to a predictable sentiment among Manchin’s critics:

Fuck you, Joe Manchin.

Of course, you can’t prove what will or won’t happen in the future. Until it does or doesn’t happen. Well, now it has or hasn’t happened.

And the Journal of the American Medical Association has published a study on what parents did with that money before Manchin helped Republicans kill it and cast millions of people back into poverty where Jesus and John Calvin want them. (h/t)

The study scrutinized 41 ,853 adults, comparing behavior of parents and non-parents. Know what happened when we gave parents that extra money during COVID? They smoked less. And what about those drugs that haunt Manchin’s stunted-brain fever dreams?

“There were no significant associations between advance child tax credit payments and changes in the probability or frequency of alcohol, cannabis, or illicit substance use among parents.

“Meaning The study results do not support concerns that providing increased financial support to parents via the advance child tax credit would be associated with increased substance use.”

In lay terms, that means parents during the pandemic — raising kids during the pandemic — and given “extra” money didn’t get drunk or high the way everyone else did during a pandemic. In really lay terms, that means Fuck you, Joe Manchin.

Five Quickies

• Reportedly, new Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), a Christian extremist, has told RePresident-elect Donald Trump, a Trumpist extremist, that there are enough yes votes in the Senate to confirm former Fox host Pete Hegseth, a Christian and Trumpist extremist, as secretary of Defense. That means some senators are currently concealing from their constituents how they plan to vote. Hegseth’s confirmation hearing slash rubber stamping is set for Jan. 14.

• The Justice Department this morning revealed it’s still considering charging as many as 200 people for breaking the law on Jan. 6, 2021, by trying to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. That’s on top of about 300 cases that haven’t yet reached trial or a plea. Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to complete the Jan. 6 prosecutions well before the Starfleet ship Enterprise is commissioned in 2245.

• Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who also goes by the nom de Jesus Pope Francis, this morning appointed as his church’s archbishop in Washington a big ol’ Catholic fuck-you to incoming, constitutionally barred RePresident Donald Trump. Cardinal Robert McElroy likes immigrants, the climate, and LGBTQ+ people, and doesn’t mind saying so, meaning we can expect the new archbishop to fuck with Trump the way other archbishops fuck with much, much younger people.

• Senate Majority Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said yesterday that Democrats failed to tell working families just how much Democrats accomplished for them in the past four years. Schumer made his remarks during an interview he chose to give to an outlet that hasn’t covered economic policy shit like that in the past forty years.

• It’s snowing in a lot of places! Be careful out there, this is the heaviest snow some states have seen in a decade or will see for a century.

TCB

TOO WHINY, DON’T READ This is me complaining about what generates paid subscriptions, so you can just stop now because it’s about to get mad self-pityish up in here.

I spent much of Saturday and Sunday finishing, publishing, and pushing out a story I’ve been working on for a while now. I revealed that the Fellowship Foundation (aka The Family) is a big funder of the National Prayer Breakfast, set to take place next month, probably in the U.S. Capitol again.

That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s part of the pattern I’ve been (un)covering for years, the relentless, gradual (except when not) incursion of Christian extremism into American government. The Fellowship Foundation is the lubed-up point of entry for this incursion; superficially anodyne, which is why Democrats help out. That, and Republicans bullying them.

This is what paves the way for “religious freedom” legislation creating the “freedom” to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, women people, and other people.

Anyway, instead of bragging about this story I’m whining like a baby or a president-elect. Because it generated only one (1) paid subscription to the Jonathan Larsen Substack where I do my original reporting. I still have at least two other stories I’m racing to get out before the inauguration, even though doing them makes zero financial sense when TFN generates so much more financial support.

I can’t even say I won’t do those stories without more support for them. It’s an addiction. I can’t not do them. All I can do is say that, if you can afford to feed my addiction the way Joe Manchin is afraid poor parents feed theirs, please consider becoming a donor or paid subscriber. Thank you.

MERCH What? You don’t have your effortlessly handsome TFN coffee mug from The TFN Shop yet? What other cup would you raise to toast the incoming president on Jan. 20…?!?

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Go get ‘em, kids!

1. In TFN’s defense, back in February your majestic-case-making TFN made a majestic case for the argument that Trump is not a stretch for the 14th Amendment disqualifier, he’s precisely who it was targeted at. As TFN wrote at the time:

“…the 14th Amendment wasn’t just a safeguard against generic insurrection, it was specifically engineered to disqualify from office people who had betrayed the country in order to disenfranchise the Black vote, Black property, and the right not to be property. And to prevent them from doing it again.

“The 14th Amendment couldn’t be more specifically directed at Trump if it disqualified everyone who lied about their weight, sexual prowess, crimes, and/or golf score.”

2. Until he decides he can, obvi.

3. I mean, that and long COVID.