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national political reporter. that is our show for tonight. time for the last word with lawrence odonnell. lawrence, im gobsmacked by some of these numbers. im just gonna leave it to you while i scratch my head. >> ali, you know that thing happens once in a while where one of our great guests really is getting warmed up right when we have to go to commercial break because thats life on commercial television? that happened last week with yale professor david blight, who is an expert on t...

lawrence, im gobsmacked by some of these numbers. im just gonna leave it to you while i scratch my head. aly you >>, know that thing happens once in awhile where one of our great guests guests really is getting warmed up right when we have to go to commercial break because thats life on commercial television. that happened last week with yale professor david blight, who is an expert on the 14th amendment. he knows everything about how it came to be, the congressional debate about it....

In colorado, are not really arguments about section three of the 14th amendment and why conservatives and liberals alike have concluded that it applies here. theyre basically arguments against the constitution. their arguments say the constitution of the united states made a big mistake in telling officials of the united states, especially a president, that if they take an oath to support the constitution and then turned against it and engage in treachery against the constitution, insurrection a...

But she was right in suspending the effect of her decision pending an appeal to the superior court of maine, recognizing that she doesnt have unilateral authority to make this decision. >> donald trumps new main lawyer is leaning on the statutes in maine, saying that those statutes only give the secretary of state authority to do things like make sure he has enough signatures to be on the ballot, requires thousands of signatures, make sure his address is correct, kind of clerical things like tha...

They can also start by reading chapter two of the book the second founding. its called toward equality. its a single chapter on, how do these parts of the 14th amendment come about? they can read that in 20 minutes. then they can go spend hours on the great debates of 1866. and they should especially learn the speeches by john bingham, it was bingham who voiced that quote i use the other day, put them in terror of their laws. that was bingham, and by the way, bingham was an anti slavery genuine ...

And the legal filing says, it does not bar them from running for office. and it does not bar them from being elected to office. it just bars them from holding office. what you do you make of that distinction? >> well, its word salad. its nonsense. its a misreading of section three of the 14th amendment. without a doubt. you mentioned earlier, when you are talking to professor tribe that the supreme court ought to be, i dont know, doing its homework or something. so why not? lets give them some h...

Amendment, and this is what he called it, he said he wanted to federalize the bill of rights. most americans dont fully grasp, i think, just what that meant then. that meant turning federalism on its head. that meant pressing the federal law in the states by federal power. that section threes at the heart of that idea. it said if you broke your oath and you left the union and you rebelled against your government, you will never hold office again. and i was also struck at how the secretary bellow...

All dead and that it could not ever exist again. that is, that somebody could try to take some states out of the union over racial slavery or over anything else. that is what people need to understand here. section three wasnt just some politicized moment that can now be used in some politicized way. it was part of a very large effort by the original republican party to put the union back together in such a way as to try, with their laws, as john bingham, the author of section one of the 14th am...

Government and tried to stay in office. now, if indeed his lawyers can win in court on the definition of section three of the 14th amendment, then it is as if we are going back and erasing the very reason it was put there in the first place, which, to the radical republicans who wrote it, the original republicans, in 1866, they were trying to prevent a new slave power. a new organized attempt to create a slave holding republic. they were trying to prevent a new confederacy of some kind that woul...

Again, the key thing to know here, and first of all i have to say, as a historian reconstruction, there are a lot of those who study this, and i am by no means the only so-called expert. but its like section three is risen from the dead. it was just gone. nobody ever cared about. nobody ever read it. now every time i turn on the news or read the paper, im seeing the full text of it. thank god for this constitutional education. but again, that came out of first what was known as the joint committ...