Efforts are ramping up to remove former President Donald Trump from state ballots in the 2024 election using the 14th Amendment after critics argued the Republican front-runner is constitutionally disqualified from serving as president because he “engaged in insurrection.”
Trump is facing four separate indictments, including charges related to hush money, election interference, racketeering, and handling of classified documents.
The 45th president argued that the charges were politically motivated attacks propagated by the Biden administration and Soros-funded Democrat prosecutors.
However, Trump opponents now claim that under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Trump is barred from holding office again because of the Jan 6 attack on the Capotil.
Last week, Florida tax attorney Lawrence Caplan challenged Trump in federal court, pointing to the “disqualification clause” in the 14th Amendment Which says those who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government cannot hold office.
He claimed Trump’s grand jury indictments, the Georgia case stemming from alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and the election interference federal case make his disqualification automatic.
But despite Caplan’s claims, Trump’s indictments do not accuse Trump of inciting a riot at the Capitol.
“The bottom line here is that President Trump both engaged in an insurrection and also gave aid and comfort to other individuals who were engaging in such actions, within the clear meaning of those terms as defined in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Caplan wrote in a filing last week.
“Assuming that the public record to date is accurate, and we have no evidence to the contrary, Trump is no longer eligible to seek the office of the President of the United States, or any other state of the Union.”
Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute notes:
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and was designed to represent a new birth of freedom for previously disenfranchised citizens.
The Amendment’s “disqualification clause” was written to ban those who had joined the Confederacy from serving in state or federal office. However, it would still “theoretically still apply” to those who engage in insurrections against the U.S.
Two legal professors and members of the conservative Federalist Society, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, endorsed the “self-executing” idea in the Pennsylvania Law Review, writing the clause “is alive and in force” and that if any government official “planned, supported, assisted, encouraged, endorsed, or aided in a material way those who engaged in the insurrection of January 6, or otherwise knowingly and willfully participated in a broader rebellion against the constitutional system, such persons are constitutionally disqualified from office,” the Daily Wire notes.
“In such situations, Section Three’s constitutional disqualifications can, should, and must be carried out,” Bode and Paulsen wrote.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he would “not going to support somebody who’s been convicted of a serious felony or disqualified under our Constitution” during last week’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee.
In an article published last week in The Atlantic, former conservative 4th Circuit Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig and liberal Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote Trump’s effort to allegedly remain in power after the 2020 election “place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause.”
Mi Familia Vota and Free Speech for People, two civil rights organizations, launched campaigns last month to pressure state officials into disqualifying Trump from appearing on ballots.
Meanwhile, former New Hampshire U.S. Senate candidate Bryant “Corky” Messner announced plans to materialize Trump’s disqualification at the state level, ABC reported.
But others have warned against using the clause against the former president.
Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz warned the notion would put the Constitution in “grave danger.”
“It would put the decision about who the President is in the hands of local Secretaries of State and Democratic governors, instead of in the hands of the people,” Dershowitz told Just the News.
Former Trump ally and Constitutional law attorney Jenna Ellis said in an X-post:
“The Left is purposefully calling J6 an ‘insurrection’ to justify a baseless 14th Amendment challenge.”
“It’s like baselessly calling election challenges on behalf of a campaign “racketeering” to justify a RICO charge,” Ellis said.
Fox News host Mark Levin blasted Judge Tribe and Harvard legal scholar Luttig for writing the self-humiliating piece” in the Atlantic, which claimed the constitutional clause stops Trump from being elected president.
“This has to be one of the truly dumbest essays ever written on the subject,” Levin said in an X-post.
“And it is something the Marxist left has been pushing for years against Trump. Trump aside, they are burning down one institution after another, self-righteously claiming that they are standing up to tyranny and for the republic. I will address this on the air tonight.”
