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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, it's word salad. it's nonsense. it's 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 don't know, doing its homework or something. so why not? let's give them some homework. they obviously or their clerks, i hope, are reading all the great debates of the winte...

Amendment, and this is what he called it, he said he wanted to federalize the bill of rights. most americans don't 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 three's 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 bellows up in maine stressed the word oath. she said i am just following my own oath. i've got to follow...

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 wasn't 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 amendment put it, he says, you have to put them in terror of your laws. they are trying to use law to...

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 would come out of the south if they were not afraid of the law. and above all, john bingham wanted, out ...

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 it's 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, i'm 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 committee on reconstruction, a group of 15 members of congress brought together in the winter of 1866 to ...