More than 155 years ago, the United States amended its Constitution in the wake of the Civil War to prevent Southern rebels from regaining political power at the ballot box.
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Any previous officeholder who has taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States,” reads Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, will now be disqualified from holding office again if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
In recent weeks, this so-called Disqualification Clause has been propelled back into the headlines by some of America’s most prominent legal minds, who argue that far from being a quaint postbellum relic, it actually gives today’s election officials the power — even the responsibility — to prohibit former President Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot again in 2024.
“Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution [and] covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order,” wrote law professors William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St.
Thomas in a deeply researched law review article posted online earlier this month.
“In particular, it disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.”
Weighing the evidence, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig soon came to the same conclusion.
“The former president’s efforts ... place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause,” Luttig declared in a much-discussed Atlantic essay (written with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe).
“The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command.”
Democrats have long claimed that Trump and other Republican lawmakers should be barred from office over their actions on (and around) Jan. 6, 2021.
But Baude, Paulsen and Luttig aren’t Democrats. They are leading conservative lawyers.
Now, as a result, a Florida tax attorney is challenging Trump’s eligibility in federal court, and election officials in Michigan, New Hampshire and elsewhere — both Democratic and Republican — are considering whether to exclude him from their state ballots.
