Top Democrats are pushing for using the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential campaign, with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to take the ultimate decision.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War, bars a citizen from holding office if they have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Mr. Schiff insisted that the 14th Amendment case against President Trump is a “valid argument.”
The law “doesn’t require that you be convicted of insurrection. It just requires that you have engaged in these acts,” he said. “It’s a disqualification from holding office … And it fits Donald Trump to a T.”
Mr. Schiff thinks the law will be tested when a secretary of state “either refuses to put him on the ballot or puts him on the ballot and is challenged by a litigant. I would imagine that it would go up to the Supreme Court. And that’s the big question mark through all this—what will the Supreme Court do?”
“There are prominent constitutional scholars as well as prominent progressive scholars who believe that he should be disqualified. But will the court take that step? Ultimately, only time will tell.”
Another Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), said in a Sunday interview with ABC that there is a “powerful argument” to be made for removing President Trump from the 2024 ballot.
“In my view, the attack on the Capitol that day was designed for a particular purpose at a particular moment, and that was to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power” as outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
“My sense is it’s probably going to get resolved in the courts,” he said. “But, you know, I think what we have to focus on in our side is we just got to win in 2024.”
Mr. Kaine also slammed 2024 Republican presidential contenders for agreeing to vote for President Trump even if he were to be convicted of a crime in any of the multiple indictments.
“If you are unwilling to say that the behavior of Donald Trump trying to overturn the peaceful transfer of power is a disqualifier, if you pledge, despite that, to vote for him, if you pledge, despite that, to pardon him should you be elected—it shows that you don’t have the moral compass that you need to be the leader of the greatest nation in the world.”
In an interview with Fox News, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sol Wisenberg called Democrat attempts to use the 14th Amendment to block President Trump’s 2024 run as “hypocritical.”
Disqualification Lawsuit Dismissal, Trump Warning
Mr. Schiff and Mr. Kaine’s comments come as a federal judge from Florida recently dismissed a lawsuit that called for disqualifying President Trump from the 2024 race.The lawsuit, filed by Florida tax attorney Lawrence Caplan of Boynton Beach, argued for disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
“President Trump’s efforts both in Washington, as well as in Georgia and perhaps other states, as well as the consequential assault on the U.S. Capitol, put Trump at the center of the disqualification clause, and as a result of which, make him ineligible to ever serve in federal office again,” the legal filing said, according to the Washington Examiner.
However, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg, an Obama appointee, dismissed the case, noting that the attorney did not have a specific injury to bring a federal lawsuit against President Trump.
Amid the Democrat push to disqualify him, President Trump has warned about potential retaliation once Republicans are in the White House.
“The Crooked Joe Biden Campaign has thrown so many Indictments and lawsuits against me that Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the Communists when it’s our turn,” President Trump wrote in a Sept. 4 post on Truth Social.
‘Grave Danger’ to Constitution
In an interview with Just the News, lawyer Alan Dershowitz called the attempts to get President Trump off the 2024 ballots “a grave danger to our constitution.”
Such attempts “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.”
“That’s the most dangerous threat currently that Donald Trump faces, because it doesn’t even require a conviction for some secretaries of state to take them off the ballot,” he said.
Speaking to The Epoch Times, constitutional scholar Mike Davis, who heads The Article III Project, said that any “partisan elected official” who attempts to use the 14th Amendment against President Trump is “going to face a very rude political and legal awakening.”
Such a move would trigger a lawsuit that would qualify for “expedited review” and pass through the federal court system to eventually land at the U.S. Supreme Court, he said.
