The Nullification Fantasy

Some Harsh Reflections

If members of the United States Congress actually believed in their bourgeois constitutional “democracy,” they would refuse to certify the open fascist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s election as the nation’s 47th president on January 6, 2025. They would select a bipartisan team of Representatives and Senators to stand on the steps of the US Capitol and read the following section of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, won through a bloody civil war fought (in its last two-plus years) to end slavery in the United States:

Section 3

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.

The legal rule is clear as day. By federal law, explicitly stated in the Constitution itself, you can’t hold a public job if you previously took an oath to support the US Constitution and subsequently tried to overthrow the US government.

Also clear as day is Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s technical ineligibility for the US president (or any other civil or military or federal office) under this rule. As is detailed at great length in the US House’s own January 6 Select Committee report and in the recently cancelled federal indictment of Trump for his leadership of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the tangerine-tinted President-Elect, who swore an oath to the US Constitution on January 20, 2017, both “engaged in insurrection [and] rebellion” against the US government and “g[a]ve aid or [and] comfort to the enemies thereof.”

(Speaking of “aid and comfort,” Trump is planning to pardon a giant slew of fascist January 6 insurrectionists early in his next presidency. He included a hymn to his January 6 “warriors” in his 2024 campaign, calling incarcerated January 6 thugs “political hostages.”)

There has been no two-thirds vote to take away Trump’s Fourteenth Amendment “disability” in either of Congress’s two houses.

I am a revolutionary Marxist who considers the US to be under the rule of a de facto capitalist-imperialist class dictatorship beneath its fading surface of bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy. I think the US government and the nation’s state governments need to be overthrown in a mass socialist revolution — certainly an event that would qualify as “an insurrection or rebellion” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s language! I would never take an oath to support the US Constitution, which I consider to be an archaic Minority Rule charter of savage class rule and empire.

That all makes me a bad choice to go to Washington and make the case for Congress nullifying Trump’s second election on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.

But liberals, moderates, progressives and even conservatives within and beyond Congress have no such excuse. They actually believe in or claim to believe in the militantly anti-democratic Founders’ holy national charter.

The language in that charter, as updated after the Civil War, is unambiguous: Trump is ineligible to hold the US presidency.

So am I telling or asking Congress to nullify Donald “They’re Eating the Pets” Trump’s second election?

Gosh, wouldn’t that be nice? Noam Chomsky was on to something in January 2020 when (right before the pandemic that Trump did so much to mass murderously spread) he called Trump “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” And every indication is that a second term for the Orange Assface of Amerikaner Fascism (OAAF) is going to be a sheer disaster, possibly terminal for humanity.

But nullification is a pipe dream. Few if any Congresspersons have more than a hint of a wisp of an inkling of the courage required to seriously advance it. Anyone who seriously advances it is considered a marginal crackpot.

There are no magic bourgeois legal and constitutional bullets out there to preempt the incoming fascist Trump-Vance regime. We are all going to have to work our asses off to stop this atrocious administration and its allies from carrying out MAGA’s horrific and many-sided Christian white nationalist agenda while at the same time and more fundamentally building forces for the revolutionary socialist overthrow of the capitalist-imperialist system that provides the soil for the growth of fascism here and abroad.