State election officials tried to erase President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot using a clause of the Constitution most people had never heard of before that fight. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office again. Colorado’s Supreme Court applied it to Trump in December 2023.
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision unanimously three months later in Trump v. Anderson, holding that states have no power to enforce Section 3 against federal candidates and that only Congress, through Section 5 legislation, can define how the clause actually operates.
That ruling settled the mechanism question. It didn’t settle the political one. Section 3 exists to bar officials who gave aid, comfort, or their broken oath to enemies of the constitutional order. It’s a serious remedy, reserved for serious conduct, and the court was right to insist that Congress, not a single state judge, decide who meets that bar. But a standard only earns respect if it gets applied with some consistency. This one hasn’t.
Consider what’s actually on the record. Hamas has been a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization since 1997, 28 years before a state court decided a speech about Jan. 6 warranted disqualification proceedings against a former president. Yet no comparable legal campaign has touched the sitting members of Congress whose conduct toward Hamas-linked and Hamas-adjacent organizations is a matter of public record, not speculation.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was censured by the full House in November 2023, 234 to 188, after she posted a video containing the phrase “from the river to the sea” and accused former President Joe Biden of enabling genocide by backing Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack. The censure resolution found she had promoted false narratives about the attack itself. Twenty-two Democrats voted with the Republican majority.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) addressed the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case, and told the group that “some people did something” on Sept. 11, framing the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil as a footnote to her real subject that day, civil liberties. Former New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman shared a panel with Norman Finkelstein in his Westchester district in January 2024 and told the audience he was starstruck to sit beside him, days after Finkelstein had called the Oct. 7 attack heroic resistance. Bowman apologized once Jewish leaders and his own party’s J Street objected, and J Street pulled its endorsement anyway.
None of this proves any of these lawmakers engaged in insurrection under Section 3’s legal definition. That’s exactly the point. The clause carries a real legal standard, and meeting it requires more than a finding about speech at a rally. But if we’re willing to treat association with, praise for, or public defense of organizations tied to designated terrorist groups as disqualifying for one man running for president, intellectual honesty demands we ask why the same conduct isn’t disqualifying, or even investigable, for members actively serving in Congress.
The government has started building the machinery to sort this out properly. The White House designated antifa a domestic terrorist organization by executive order on Sept. 22, 2025. The House has a pending bill, H.R. 4097, directing the secretary of state to review whether CAIR meets the statutory criteria for foreign terrorist organization designation. Both efforts point toward the conclusion the Supreme Court already reached in Trump v. Anderson: Disqualification and designation decisions need a neutral, prospectively defined process, not an ad hoc one built for whichever public figure is politically inconvenient that year.
SEVENTY-SEVEN MILLION VOTES. ONE RULE TO ERASE THEM ALL
I spend my working life around fiduciary standards, the rules that force a decision-maker to apply the same duty of care to every client regardless of who’s asking. A trustee doesn’t get to hold one beneficiary to the letter of the agreement and wave through a friend’s conflict of interest. Constitutional enforcement deserves the same discipline. Section 3 either means something and applies to everyone who meets its standard, or it’s a weapon pulled out for one side and holstered for the other. Due process isn’t a courtesy reserved for defendants you happen to like. It’s the whole point of having a standard at all.
Congress now has the authority the Supreme Court just handed it. It should write a clear, neutral rule and apply it evenly, to a former president and a sitting representative alike, or stop pretending the clause is anything more than a tool for whichever side holds the gavel.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.