On Wednesday, a government watchdog group filed a lawsuit attempting to prohibit Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 because he broke his oath of office by engaging in an insurgency.
The action, brought in Colorado by the Washington-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), is based on a US Constitution amendment approved following the 1861-65 Civil War.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits anybody from holding public office if they have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after vowing to support and defend the Constitution once.
The ratification of the amendment in 1868 was intended to ban supporters of the slave-holding Confederacy from being elected to Congress or holding federal jobs.
Similar legal efforts to remove Trump from the ballot using the 14th Amendment are proceeding in numerous other states
CREW petitioned Colorado elections officials on behalf of six Colorado voters to keep Trump off the ballot in next year’s presidential election.
“Donald Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the suit says.
“His efforts culminated on January 6, 2021, when he incited, exacerbated, and otherwise engaged in a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.
“Because Trump took these actions after he swore an oath to support the Constitution, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits him from being President and from qualifying for the Colorado ballot for President in 2024,” the suit says.
Similar legal efforts to remove Trump from the ballot using the 14th Amendment are proceeding in numerous other states and may end up before the US Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority.
According to CREW, just one public figure has been disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment since 1868, a New Mexico county commissioner who was removed from office for his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Donald Trump, 77, is scheduled to stand trial in March on allegations of plotting to overthrow the results of the November 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
In a related case in the southern state of Georgia, he faces similar charges.
Trump was impeached a second time by the House of Representatives following the Capitol attack – he was charged with inciting an insurgency – but was acquitted by the Senate.
The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the constitution
A number of legal experts, including J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former US Court of Appeals judge, and Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, have argued that Trump should be barred from running for president again.
Luttig and Tribe argued in an article published last month in The Atlantic that a criminal conviction was not required to prevent Donald Trump from running for government again.
“The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and congressional legislation,” they said.
“The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”
Legal experts argue Trump’s actions make him ineligible for the presidency again
Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss, as well as his followers’ eventual siege of the US Capitol, legal experts say, “place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause.”
“He is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again,” they added.
Donald Trump responded to efforts to remove him from the presidential ballot in a recent post on his Truth Social platform, stating they had “no legal basis.”
“Like Election Interference, it is just another ‘trick’ being used by the Radical Left Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, to again steal an Election,” he said.
