Congress Should Not Seat America’s Enemies: The Constitutional Case for Keeping Democratic Socialists of America Members Out of Office

Congress Should Not Seat America’s Enemies:

The constitutional case for keeping Democratic Socialists of America members out of office.

After the New York and New Jersey Democratic primaries, it now seems likely that the next freshman class of the House will include Dariazila Avila Chevalier, a Muslim convert who co-founded an organization that tweeted “Death to America” and who bragged, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag” as well as Hisham ‘Adam’ Hamawy: an associate of the Blind Sheikh terrorist leader who testified on his behalf at his terror trial.

The success of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) candidates with Marxist and Communist views (Dariazila appears to have also praised Stalin) has captured headlines even as most people, including those in Congress, have forgotten what happened the first time a socialist won a House seat.

In 1919, the House voted 309-1 not to seat Rep. Victor L. Berger (pictured above), the first socialist congressman, based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress” if they “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

It was WWI and Berger’s Marxist rag was anti-war. “The one and only issue in this case is that of Americanism,” the House Special Committee that excluded Berger found. “It is whether a man who in 1911 took an oath as a member of the House to support the Constitution of the United States and who, when this country declared war against the Imperial German Government, became the head and front of an organized conspiracy to hinder, obstruct, and embarrass the Government in its fight for existence, should be admitted to membership in this House simply because a constituency in one of our States has seen fit to give him a plurality of its vote.”

Berger’s Socialist Party of America splintered into two parties, one of them, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, whose red rose symbol is carried on by its successor, the Democratic Socialists of America or the DSA that is currently taking over the Democrats.

Some might dismiss this as ancient history, a WWI proceeding based on a Civil War amendment, but it was the Democrats who decided to revive it in recent years, citing Berger’s case, among others, during their campaign to bar President Trump and pro-Trump members of Congress from running for reelection.

The Colorado Supreme Court even excluded Trump from the ballot election based on Section 3 (the Disqualification Clause) of the 14th Amendment only to be overridden by the Supreme Court of the United States. This was part of a sustained effort to revive post-war legislation aimed at ex-Confederates and the KKK against Trump and Republicans.

While these efforts failed to achieve their goal, the 14th Amendment and some of the acts passed after the Civil War remain ticking time bombs that can be used to ban the opposition. And if Democrats and leftists achieve legislative and judicial majorities, they will revive efforts to treat J6 as an ‘insurrection’, to bar anyone who expressed support for it from public office, to prosecute anyone who holds public office and supports Trump, and to extend that to the GOP.

It would be naively optimistic to imagine that the same two-tier legal machinery that was used to hand out tough prison sentences to abortion protesters or to label the J6 protests as an insurrection while cheering on BLM and anti-ICE riots as expressions of free speech could not and would not be used to outlaw the opposition and fundamentally transform the political system.

But unlike the attempts to weaponize the Disqualification Clause against Trump or the WW! overreach of anti-war prosecutions that ultimately kept Berger out of prison and eventually allowed him back into Congress, the case for not seating DSA and other radicals is fairly clear.

There is already ample evidence against Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep Rashida Tlaib and others from their own statements. The main defect to a Disqualification Clause case against Avila or Hisham is that the 14th Amendment only applies to elected officials who had taken an oath before their acts of treason, but that can be easily remedied once they are already in office.

And Congressional leaders can simply choose to ask Dariazila Avila Chevalier if she regrets having created an organization that called for “Death to America” or the destruction of western civilization, and whether those are still part of her goals, and see if she lies or doesn’t. Thus far, she’s thrown out gibberish word salads, even when asked if she was a Communist (despite her past Communist social media activity) rather than specifically disavowing individual positions. --->READ MORE HERE

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