If four criminal indictments are unable to accomplish the left’s goal of derailing former President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term, an organization in the nation’s capital is taking a more direct approach by pushing for his name to be removed from ballots in at least one state.
According to a lawsuit filed in Colorado, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington argue that Trump is somehow constitutionally ineligible to run for president.
Citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the group asserted that Trump has “disqualified himself from public office” and “must be removed from the ballot.”
As the plaintiffs maintained in the court documents, Trump violated his oath of office in the aftermath of the 2020 election and should be barred from holding future office under the Constitution’s so-called “disqualification clause.”
“On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood before the nation and took an oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” the organization asserted in a statement on the matter. “After losing the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump violated that oath by recruiting, inciting and encouraging a violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a futile attempt to remain in office.”
Of course, such an argument was roundly rebuked by many experts, including Jonathan Turley, a Fox News Channel legal analyst.
Calling it “the most dangerous theory that has emerged in decades,” he concluded that the lawsuit’s claims are “entirely unsupported by the text and the history of the 14th Amendment.”
Offering some historical context, Turley noted that the clause emerged in the post-Civil War era in response to a literal uprising against the U.S. government.
“There was an army on the other side,” he said in reference to the Confederacy. “They had their own foreign policy.”
Although some legal scholars — including a handful of conservatives — gave credence to the lawsuit’s assertion, Trump and his allies are portraying this as yet another desperate ploy to prevent him from serving another term in the White House.
In a social media post, the former president described the lawsuit as “election interference,” writing that “almost all legal scholars have voiced opinions that the 14th Amendment has no legal basis or standing relative to the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election.”
