CREW -- On Jan 6 five years ago
On Jan 6 five years ago
- Tue, Jan 6 2026 at 10:35 AM
Mark,
On this day five years ago, Donald Trump, the sitting president of the United States, incited a violent insurrection to keep himself in power after losing an election. His supporters stormed the Capitol, injured Capitol Police and desecrated the halls of our government.
As terrible as the violence of January 6th was, it is painfully evident that the human casualties and the physical damage to our nation’s Capitol were not the full scope of the tragedy of that day.
Our nation and our democracy suffered. We knew that CREW had to take immediate action. So we pushed Congress to impeach and convict President Trump. When Congress failed to hold Trump accountable, we brought civil litigation to hold insurrectionists accountable under the Constitution. Section Three of the 14th Amendment, also known as the Disqualification Clause, bars any person from holding federal or state office who took an “oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
That’s why CREW filed a lawsuit on behalf of three New Mexico residents, asserting that a New Mexico County Commissioner, Couy Griffin, disqualified himself from public office by violating Section Three of the 14th Amendment — and the court agreed.
They ruled that the January 6th attack constituted an “insurrection” under the 14th Amendment and that Griffin “engaged in” that insurrection, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, by mobilizing, inciting and then joining the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th. As a result, the Court concluded that Griffin is constitutionally ineligible and barred for life from holding office in the United States — the first successful trial to enforce Section Three of the 14th Amendment in more than 150 years.
Thanks to setting that precedent, we took on one of our biggest challenges in CREW’s history: We sued to keep Donald Trump off the ballot.
Mark, we believed — and still believe — that Donald Trump disqualified himself from holding office by inciting the January 6th insurrection. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed, but the Supreme Court later ruled that states cannot enforce the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause against federal candidates. However, it did not overturn the factual findings that Trump engaged in insurrection.
All of this background leads us to today.
Donald Trump is nearly one year into his second term and has only shown the dangers of allowing an oath-breaking insurrectionist to return to power.
After openly threatening to “terminate” parts of the Constitution, he has behaved as if he’s above the law and not bound by fundamental constitutional limits, democratic norms or accountability. He has used the power of government to target political opponents, tried to override Congress’s control of federal spending, attacked career civil servants, defied court orders and profited from the presidency in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses.
And perhaps most troubling are Trump’s continued attacks on the Constitution and his effort to interfere with our elections.
In March 2025, he issued an executive order called “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which tried to impose sweeping, unilateral changes to how elections are run — including new voter registration rules, federal control over voter list maintenance, reviews of voting machine certifications and new ballot deadlines.
Any one of these steps would make it harder for eligible Americans to vote. They’re a direct attack on free and fair elections and on the states’ authority to run them.
Just five years after trying to overturn an election he lost, Trump is again claiming powers the presidency simply does not have. The president does not run elections in this country and this executive order is an attempt to seize powers that belong to the states and to Congress.
Mark, it is fair to say that, today, President Trump is leading a different kind of siege against our Constitution and our democracy.
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