politics

A step toward ending government corruption

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Unwritten rules are fine, so long as everyone complies with them. But then a person or group comes along—such as the Trump Crime Family—that requires us to put actual words to these unwritten rules to turn them into written law.

And after years of Congressional representatives talking about preventing themselves from trading stocks while not actually doing anything, I think it’s time we the people proposed the law we want. Therefore, as my contribution to the discussion, I offer…

A Law Delineating Emoluments Prohibitions that Were Previously Understood but Unwritten

Section I: People Subject to This Law
1. Elected and appointed members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
2. Members of the Supreme Court.
3. The President and Vice President of the United States.
4. People appointed by the President, whether confirmed by the Senate or not.
5. People hired or appointed by, or who in the normal course of business report directly to, anyone in lines 1, 2, 3, or 4.
6. People hired or appointed by, or who in the normal course of business report directly to, anyone in line 5.
7. Immediate family members of anyone in lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.

Section II: Prohibited and Required Actions of People in Section I.
1. All people covered by this law are prohibited from buying or selling stocks, bonds, or any other form of ownership of any company, whether publicly traded or privately held.
2. All people covered by this law are required to place all assets in a blind trust.
2.a. Assets with a combined value of less than 50% of the mean personal annual income of the United States may be exempted from this requirement.
2.b. A primary residence may be exempted from this requirement.
2.c. Covered people shall have 30 days from notice of election, appointment, or hiring to a position listed in Section I in order to complete this requirement.
3. All people covered by this law are prohibited from communicating what would be considered “insider information” about any government or business activities to any person or people for financial benefit.

Section III: Penalties for Failure to Comply with This Law
1. Stocks, bonds, or other forms of ownership purchased are subject to forfeiture—in their entirety—to the United States Treasury General Account.
2. Proceeds from sales of stocks, bonds, or other forms of ownership are subject to forfeiture—in their entirety—to the United States Treasury General Account.
3. Assets with a combined value greater than 50% of the mean personal annual income of the United States held outside of a blind trust are subject to forfeiture—in their entirety—to the United States Treasury General Account.
4. Instances of communicating insider information (see Section II, 3) shall be fined at a rate equal to the potential gain enjoyed by the recipients of such communication.

Section IV: Duration of These Requirements
1. People listed in Section I shall be subject to this law during the entire time they hold one of the offices listed in Section I, and for 180 days after leaving such office.
2. Those people in office when this law is adopted shall have 30 days to comply with all the provisions herein.

Stand Up and Read!

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Oligarchs are grabbing power, rights are being trampled, and even with millions marching in No Kings rallies, we’re feeling helpless, hopeless, and unheard.

It is time to Resist!

It is more important than ever to stand up to be noticed, stand up for the downtrodden, stand up for what’s right.

With the publication of our newest anthology, Resistance, Fantastic Books is joining the fight. Profits from the sale of this anthology will be donated to two organizations that are doing their part: the American Civil Liberties Union and Pro Publica.

The eighteen science fiction and fantasy stories in this book tell tales of standing up for what’s right, fighting against oppression and repression, showing that even one person can make a difference. All the authors represented in this volume have donated their stories to help support the cause, and four of them—Scott Edelman, Ron Kaiser, Samantha Katz, and Allen Steele (in collaboration with Ian Randal Strock)—have provided brand-new, never-before-published stories. The other authors are: E.C. Ambrose, David Brin, Michael A. Burstein, Randee Dawn, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Gregory Frost, Daniel M. Kimmel, Shariann Lewitt, Gail Z. Martin, Susan Shwartz, Hildy Silverman, Cecilia Tan, Michael A. Ventrella, and Jean Marie Ward.

Resistance
edited by Ian Randal Strock
300 pages, May 26, 2026
case laminate hardcover: $29.99, ISBN 978-1-5154-6997-1
trade paperback: $19.99, ISBN 978-1-5154-6996-4

Resistance—and all Fantastic Books books—are distributed via Ingram.

Don’t like Congress? Your opinion doesn’t matter.

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

RealClear Polling doesn’t show a Congressional approval rating above 40% in the last 15 years. In the short term, Ballotopedia agrees. Gallup has Congress’s job approval rating in the teens.

In other words, everywhere we look, nobody likes what Congress is doing or how they’re doing their jobs. Every news story using those numbers predicts a massive change in Congress at the midterm election, shifting control to the Democratic party, and watchers hope they’re right.

But what none of those polls and none of those pundits are doing is looking at four hundred and thirty-five individual campaigns for four hundred and thirty-five individual seats in the House of Representatives.

And that’s why I think a lot of people looking forward to that massive change are going to be very disappointed next January 3, when the 120th Congress is seated. It’s very difficult to do legitimate polling on such a granular level, but the way our government is put together, combining the results of such tiny polling samples is the only way to get a legitimate estimation of what is going to happen. Because while the sentiments of 55%, or 60%, or 70% of the voting public in the US may be with the Democrats, that doesn’t matter. What matters is which candidate gets the greater number of votes in the California 41st, and the Texas 32nd, and the Florida 9th, and the New York 15th, and on and on and on. Each district, by itself, in an election of several hundred thousand people, upon which the opinions of 99.8% of the population matters not one whit.

Congressional approval ratings are always low. People never like what Congress—as a whole—is doing, or its direction. If that were the only thing that mattered, we’d see a tidal wave of electoral defeats among Representatives every two years. But we don’t. We don’t see that tidal wave, and we won’t as long as we have a body made up of representatives by geography who have chosen the boundary lines of their own districts in order to guarantee their re-election. And we, the voters, always vote to re-elect our own Congressional representatives.

As Ballotopedia told us, in the election of 2024, fifteen Representatives running for re-election were defeated in primary or general elections. Further, they say, since 2014 (six elections), a total of 125 House incumbents were defeated: an average of 21 per election (remember, out of 435 seats).

That’s the reason we keep getting the same non-functional Congress we all hate not doing what we want: because we only vote for our own representative. It doesn’t matter what I think of the Speaker—who lives in Louisiana. And it doesn’t matter what I think of the minority leader—who lives in the next district over from mine in Brooklyn. Neither does my opinion of any of the 432 other members of the House matter. I only have a say in who will represent New York’s 9th district. And the two major political parties have done such an excellent job of choosing their voters through political gerrymandering that almost none of the 435 districts have any chance of changing the party of the person who represents them.

A year ago—in April of 2025—Fair Vote said that 81% of the House seats were already decided… for the 2026 election! And this is not surprising or new. It’s been going on for decades.

So when everyone around me expresses optimism for change following the election of 2026, I’m the Eeyore. I’m the one who is not looking forward to the results, because I don’t expect very much, if anything, to change. Unite America claimed that only 69 of the seats were competitive elections in 2024. We’ve seen absolutely no reason to think it will be any different this time around.
https://www.uniteamerica.org/articles/research-brief-why-are-most-congressional-elections-uncompetitive-2

And this is one of those times that I don’t have a solution to propose. We’re stuck. We’ve let the parties gerrymander the country too damn far, and we can’t find a way out of it. So as much as I hate that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities; as much as I hate that Congress—even if its members wanted to—can’t do anything it should; as much as I hate the political gridlock caused by extreme politicians who only campaign in the primaries because they don’t have to compete in a general election… I fear we’re stuck with it all until we can find a way to tear down walls of power that the Democans and Republicrats have built for themselves.

Put simply: we’re screwed.

Putting the hornets back in the nest

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Regardless of who, why, or how the Trump Iran War started, one thing is certain: we are going to be fighting it and paying for it for a long time to come.

In the first three weeks of the war, 13 US service members have lost their lives, at least four US airplanes have been destroyed, and the US has spent tens of billions of dollars on this fight. In other countries, hundreds or thousands of people have already been killed, the global energy trade has been disrupted, prices have skyrocketed, and the total cost will never be known.

Rational Americans are—quite correctly—demanding to know why President Trump felt the burning need to launch a hot war when he did, and without consultation with our allies (those same allies, by the way, of whom he is now demanding help to keep the Strait of Hormuz open). Equally important is when and how he sees this war ending: the best comment we have on that so far is that he’ll “feel it in his bones.”

And yet, his opinion of such things has proven—time and again—to be absolutely meaningless. His actions scream that he is operating according to his dreams and his view of “look at me, I’m strong and powerful,” with only barest nod at reality. But even if Donald Trump were to suddenly embrace altruistic, rational thought, and realize that we should no longer be fighting this war, that will not end it.

We’ve kicked over the hornets’ nest that was the religious dictatorship in Iran, but we have not destroyed all the hornets in it. Those with access to weapons in Iran have no reason to stop fighting, even if we do. They’ll keep threatening shipping through the Strait. They’ll keep dropping explosive-laden drones on their neighbors. They’ll keep urging their “proxies” to kill and disrupt as much as possible.

And we’re stuck with it.

Even if a new president took office next week, we’d still have to deal with the insanity launched by Donald Trump’s war of “don’t look at the Trump Epstein files.” Just as he came to office saying “no more forever wars,” such as what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks, we’ll be dealing with the Trump Iran War for years to come. Even if Congress somehow manages to cut off funding for this “excursion” of Donald Trump’s, that will only prevent us from inflicting more damage on Iran; it won’t stop the Iranians from a rampaging campaign of revenge for what we’ve done to them in the last few weeks.

So now is the time to figure out—as Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington taught us—how to get over this heavy ground as lightly as we can. I fear the only answer is indeed a land war in Asia, in which we send in thousands of ground troops to root out every last adherent of the ruling clique in Iran, and then—as we did in Japan after World War II—set up a US-run government to enable the country to eventually transition into a freedom-loving democracy. It was long and hard in Japan, but we see the results when we don’t do everything necessary: Taliban-run Afghanistan, and the headache that is still Iraq.

And this is the point where I wish I was smarter. Actually I wish our political leaders were even smarter than that, that they could figure out an easy way out of this morass Donald Trump has dumped us into. I fear there isn’t one, and the only way out is through; a long, bloody, soul-rending struggle that Trump has thrown us into for no reason but to soothe his own ego.

The Trump Iran War: Who Benefits?

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Last year, President Donald Trump was railing against wind power, urging the UK to shut down their wind power farms in favor “cheap and reliable” oil. His Big Beautiful Bill (which seems much more like a Frankenbill) cancelled tax breaks for solar and wind power in the US.

Three weeks ago, he launched a hot war against Iran.

In response—a response any first-year political science student could have predicted—Iran threatened the safety of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending the cost of oil skyrocketing and imperiling the global flow of oil. And now Trump is calling for other countries to pledge military support to secure the Strait, in effect, demanding they clean up after his mistake.

The United States, which is nearly self-sufficient in terms of oil, is not threatened by that bottleneck. Prices, however, skyrocketed. And last week, Trump reminded the world “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

Who benefits?

The “we” in that Trump quote is not the average American; it’s the oil companies in the US. And quite possibly Trump himself and his close advisors. The US oil companies, for whom the cost of producing and distributing oil and gasoline have not changed, now get to sell their product for more money.

Global instability also leads to lower values for national currencies, increasing interest in those media which are not tied to any nation, such as cryptocurrencies. In October 2025, Bitcoin peaked at a value around $126,000 per coin. It then plummeted to about $62,000 in February. Since Trump launched this war, it is back up to $74,000, a 20% increase. Ethereum—one of the cryptocurrencies in the president’s personal portfolio—has followed a similar trajectory.

Saudi Arabia is almost the undisputed power in the Gulf region. Indeed, the only country that can threaten them is Iran, which is lead by people who are unpredictable and dangerous. Reports March 16 say that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, is speaking regularly with Trump, urging him to continue attacking Iran harshly.

Meanwhile, since the onset of this war, you haven’t thought about the Trump-Epstein Files, have you?

Time to Resign

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

The US military removed Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela.

The Abraham Lincoln carrier group is nearing Iran to support the protesters demanding regime change in that country.

I think it’s time we started considering domestic regime change. Donald Trump: you can save us all a lot of pain if you resign with dignity and grace.

And note, the founders considered this an acceptable possibility. Article 2, Clause 6, begins: “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office…” Resignation is acceptable. Richard Nixon did so for the good of the country, as did Vice Presidents John Calhoun and Spiro Agnew.

Trump is Pissing on the World

~ ianrandalstrock ~ 1 Comment

Donald Trump is like a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership of them.

His latest is threatening staunch American allies with tariffs if they don’t support the forceful US annexation of Greenland. “We need Greenland for security,” he says. Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s what Vladimir Putin said just before ordering Russian troops to attack Ukraine. That’s the same Ukraine war, by the way, that Donald Trump said—during the 2024 election—that he would end within 24 hours if he won the election. We’re still waiting for that.

Long ago, I wondered if Donald Trump was a stooge working for Putin. Now I realize he’s simply doing his best to emulate Putin. Indeed, Putin gets all this Trumpian love for free.

Trump’s only morality is self-aggrandizement. Everything he does as president seems to have the same goal: to put more money in his pocket, or to put his name on things. In that respect, he’s not unlike a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership. The last major US territorial acquisition was the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. The US acquired Puerto Rico and Guam due to the Spanish–American War (in 1898; we also got the Philippines, which became an independent country in 1946). And the US purchased part of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.

So what happens if the US manages to “acquire” Greenland? He becomes the first president since World War II to increase the geographic size of the United States. Indeed, he also gets to claim to be the president who acquired the largest parcel of territory for the US, and if you’ve listened to any of his speeches, you know “first” and “biggest” are among his holy words. (For comparison, Alaska is about 665,000 square miles, and the Louisiana Purchase [which the US got from France in 1803] involved about 828,000 square miles, while Greenland measures about 836,000 square miles.)

Any other president would measure success in terms of national peace and prosperity; the people’s health and wealth; happiness, amity, and community. But how does Trump measure success? With crowns on his head and dollars in his pocket.

He was talking about his “Board of Peace” this week. It’s key feature? Each member has to pay $1 billion, which he as chairman gets to control. The gold decorations dripping all over the White House are not impressive; they are there to tell him he controls vast sums of wealth. But he looks at the truly wealthy—Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—and he feels his inferiority complex, because his wealth is not on that level. So he keeps grifting, keeps taking what he can.

The first load of Venezuelan has recently been sold, and the proceeds of that sale wound up in a Qatari bank. Why Qatar? Why not the US? Or, for that matter, why not Venezuela? Because this way, Trump has control over that money, can disburse it as he will. It has suddenly become his money.

The Trump Kennedy Center. The Trump Ballroom. The Trump Battleship. The Trump Institute of Peace. The Trump Savings Account. The Trump Special Visa for Rich People. The Trump Southern Border Boulevard in Palm Beach. His face on the National Park pass. And on, and on…

It’s time we told Donald Trump to piss off.

Edited February 6, 2026, to add this link to an article entitled “Everything Donald Trump has tried to name after himself since his White House return.’

Shouldn’t immunity be a two-way street?

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States (2022) seems to have set the standard for presidential immunity, that the President of the United States may not be sued for anything he does while serving as President (without any comment or direction as to what a President might do during his time in office that is not within the scope of his “official acts”). It seems most current interpretations of that ruling assume the President may not be the subject of any lawsuit, period.

At the same time, however, the United States is experiencing the presidency of a person who’s first response to almost any disagreement is to sue. I’m not sure there is an exact count of the number of lawsuits he has brought. For only the latest example, see President Trump’s threat to sue JPMorgan Chase.

As much as the President needs to do things that an ordinary citizen oughtn’t be able to do, it seems manifestly unfair that while Donald Trump as the President is immune from lawsuits, Donald Trump himself has the complete freedom to file lawsuits of his own.

Added January 30, 2026: And now he is suing the Internal Revenue Service. From the linked article: “The lawsuit, filed Thursday at a federal courthouse in Miami, says Trump is suing in his personal capacity, not as president.” So he can differentiate Trump-the-person from Trump-the-president. Hmm….

It’s not a “health care” debate

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

One of the big topics related to the government right now is the ongoing debate over “health care.” Specifically, allowing the Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, finding a better way to pay for health care, and blaming the other side for the mess we’re in (well, that last is pretty standard for every issue at the federal level). As a person who tries to use words precisely, to best communicate my thoughts to you, I cringe every time a politician or pundit says “health care,” because that’s never what they mean.

Health care is when I go to the doctor and say “this hurts.” The doctor checks me out, diagnoses what is causing the hurt, and treats it (or tells me what to do) so that it stops hurting. That’s health care. And in that respect, health care in the United States is great. We have excellent doctors and nurses and physician assistants and therapists and… a whole slew of people who do remarkable things to make us feel better and keep us healthy, along with the equipment and medications and more. And none of that is what they mean when the politicians and reporters talk about health care.

No, what they’re talking about is “health insurance”: a system of paying for the health care we get that keeps us going. And health insurance in the United States is a disaster, falling apart and falling fast. And none of the tweaks they keep proposing at each other are going to fix the health insurance industry, because we’ve been misusing it and expecting far more from it than it can ever possibly provide.

The thing is, health insurance isn’t some unending pool of money which pays for our every smallest medical need. Health insurance—indeed, any form of “insurance” (except the half-wager when you’re playing blackjack and the dealer has an ace showing)—is a collection of people betting on something they hope won’t happen.

Start with something slightly less controversial: car insurance. You pay a small amount every year to someone managing the money (the insurance company), against the (hopefully very small) chance of being in a crash and requiring a lot of money to repair your car (or one your actions damaged). This only works if there are a lot of people paying in for this insurance and very few of them actually get in crashes requiring large pay outs. In the ideal world, if you had enough money to cover those potential expenses, you wouldn’t bother buying insurance; you’d just pay the repair/replacement costs yourself if you ever needed to (I’m ignoring your responsibility for the other guy’s car, and why states require car insurance). What this all means is that most people pay for car insurance and don’t ever get any money from it, because the entire group of people is funding the expenses of the one or two people who will wind up actually needing it. It only works because relatively few people need it, and no one knows if they are going to be that one person who does. So everybody pays a little, and most never get anything but peace of mind from it.

Health insurance is similar to car insurance. At least, it used to be. You would pay a small amount every year against the (statistically) small chance of having a catastrophic illness or injury that would be very expensive to treat. And the few people who did have such needs would have their expenses paid for by the insurance company (again, in an ideal world), while everyone else in the insurance pool would wipe the sweat from their brows and say “I’m glad I wasn’t the one who needed the money.”

But health care has evolved. Most people used to only see a doctor when they had a major injury or illness. As we’ve developed more of the concept of wellness care, more and more of us go for regular check-ups, low-level medical treatments to prevent (or earlier detect) major problems, and so forth.

And while these are (theoretically) inexpensive health care events, we now expect “insurance” to pay for them all. (Admittedly, the costs of those inexpensive events have been rising, too. And if our politicians were serious about this whole debate, that is where they would be focusing: why does it cost hundreds of dollars for a regular check-up?) But as we expect most people to have those regular check-ups and those preventative treatments, we’re over-stressing the ability of health insurance to cover the catastrophic costs it was designed for. That’s not a fault of insurance; it isn’t a money-multiplier. Way back when, if everyone paid $100 a month for insurance, it was against the fear that one person in a hundred would have a medical problem this year that might cost $100,000 to treat. At those numbers, the insurance pool was sufficient.

But today, we’ve gotten to the stage where, instead of everyone paying in against the rare major need, everyone is paying in their $100 a month… and everyone is expecting insurance to pay the doctor $400 for our “see me in six months” regular check-ups, and we’re expecting insurance to pay for the $25-a-month prescription medicine, and suddenly there’s no money in the insurance pool for the $5,000 the emergency room is going to charge to treat your broken leg, and that $100,000 expense will be enough to bankrupt the insurance company.

The failure is that we’ve spent a couple of generations teaching people that medical treatment is health care, and it’s not just for emergencies, but that everyone should seek it out continually as a preventative. Medically, that’s a good thing. But financially, it may be ruinous. Our methods of paying for it have not kept up.

The recently signed discharge petition means the House of Representatives is going to vote on an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies sometime in January. Even if it passes, it’s not going to fix anything, because the entire concept of health insurance is broken. I readily admit that I don’t have the solution, either. But someone smarter than all of us is going to have to figure it out. Because if it’s something we expect most people to use, then the only way to pay for it is individually. And the costs have risen so far so fast that most people simply can not afford to pay for it.

The president’s proposed fix—“we’ll just give everyone $2,000, rather than paying the insurance companies”—is naive at best. Where is the government getting the money to give everyone $2,000? The same place the government gets all its money: from the people. It’s a non-starter.

Indeed, the whole debate has become the Second Law of Thermodynamics for finance: if everyone is paying for insurance, but everyone expects to use it, then insurance is nothing more than a drain on everyone’s wallet.

Blackjack table image by Frerk Meyer, shared under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Blurry_blackjack_table.jpg/640px-Blurry_blackjack_table.jpg

How Donald Trump intends to stay in office beyond January 20, 2029

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Is this all far-fetched, doom-and-gloom, dystopian theorizing? Probably. I hope certainly. Nevertheless, it is a topic of conversation which keeps cropping up, so…

I know how Donald Trump is going to attempt to stay in office beyond the end of his term. It’s Section 3 of the 20th Amendment. Section 3 talks about who shall become President or act as President (two different things) if there is no President elect or if the President elect is not qualified to serve as President. The final clause of that Section reads “the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.” In other words, if the election is somehow prevented from occurring—and despite Article II, Section 1, and Amendment 20, Section 1—I think Donald Trump’s sycophants are relying on this phrase to enable the Congress to “select” him to “act” as President “until a President or Vice President shall have qualified” (by being elected).

This revelation came while I was researching the essay I thought I was going to write, noting that, regardless of what Trump and the Trumpians try to do to the election of 2028, a lack of an incoming President does not enable the current President to remain in office.

I was going to quote Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says the President “shall hold his office during the Term of four Years”—thus limiting the time the President serves to four years, whether a successor has been elected or not.

I was going to go on to the 12th Amendment, which says “…no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” Thus preventing the President from becoming Vice President, only to succeed to the Presidency with the removal of the new President.

Then comes the first Section of the 20th Amendment: “The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Repeating and emphasizing the Article II quote above: the President’s term ends, regardless of whether or not there is a successor waiting.

And, of course, the first Section of the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

But then I stumbled upon Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, as I said above. That’s the “well, there may be a way around the Constitution” that the most ardent Trumpians have been hinting at. It’s fairly simple, if we assume they can somehow prevent the next Presidential election. And one doesn’t have to be too creative to figure out ways to do that: declare a state of emergency, ban gatherings “for public safety” during the first week in November, so that an election cannot be held (that’s why they keep pushing to get rid of mail-in ballots and early voting; so that there will be no ballots to count). Or, perhaps easier, would be to look at the fifth paragraph of Article II, Section 1: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Such an emergency declaration could simply prevent the Electors from gathering to cast their votes in December. No electoral votes, therefore nothing to count on January 6, and no President elect. Blocking that, rather than the general election, would mean that there would still be a new Congress elected who would then be charged with selecting that person who shall act as President.

Therefore, Congress needs to adopt a new law, by a veto-proof margin, saying “No person who is ineligible to be elected President may act as President.”