Washington,A government watchdog organization has taken legal action to bar former President Donald Trump from running for the presidential office in 2024. The lawsuit, filed in the state of Colorado by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a Washington-based organization, is grounded in a constitutional amendment ratified after the American Civil War of 1861-1865.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution disqualifies individuals from holding public office if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after having pledged to uphold and defend the Constitution.
This 1868 amendment was primarily designed to prevent supporters of the Confederacy, which advocated slavery, from being elected to Congress or holding federal positions.
Acting on behalf of six Colorado voters, CREW has petitioned state elections officials to exclude Donald Trump from the ballot in the forthcoming 2024 presidential election.
The lawsuit contends, “Donald Trump attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.” It further alleges that Trump’s actions, culminating in the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, violated his oath to support the Constitution. Consequently, it argues that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Trump from being President and from qualifying for the Colorado presidential ballot in 2024.
Similar legal endeavors to prevent Trump’s candidacy through the 14th Amendment are ongoing in several other states and may eventually reach the United States Supreme Court, where conservatives currently hold a 6-3 majority
According to CREW, since 1868, eight public officials have been disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, with the most recent case involving a county commissioner from New Mexico who was removed from office due to his involvement in the January 6 Capitol attack.
The 77-year-old Trump is set to stand trial in Washington in March on charges related to conspiring to overturn the results of the November 2020 election, won by Democrat Joe Biden. He also faces similar charges in a separate case in the southern state of Georgia.
It’s important to note that Trump was impeached for a second time by the House of Representatives following the Capitol attack, with the charge being incitement of insurrection. However, he was acquitted by the Senate.
Several legal experts, including J. Michael Luttig, a former conservative US Court of Appeals judge, and Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, have argued that a criminal conviction is not necessary to disqualify Trump from holding office again. They contend that the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment operates independently of criminal proceedings and impeachment, targeting those who betray their constitutional oaths by attempting to undermine the government.
Trump, in response to these efforts to prevent him from running in 2024, has dismissed them as having “no legal basis” and described them as tactics employed by the “Radical Left Communists, Marxists, and Fascists” to manipulate elections.
