The 14th Amendment: A Challenge to the First Supreme Court Decision in Colorado and the American Civil Libertarians’ Concern about Trump’s Eluding
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment dates back to the years after the Civil War, and was enacted to prevent former members of the Confederacy from holding elected office. In the past 150 years, it has only been used minimally.
Supreme Court decisions that could have a significant impact on the election, between Trump’s eligibility for the ballot and his claims of immunity, are waiting for their review. Three justices were nominated by Trump.
Guy-Uriel Charles, a Harvard law professor, told NPR recently that the election in 2024 is going to be hard. “So the sooner we know what the fundamental rules are, the better off that we’re going to be. It’s important that the court sort this out as quickly as possible.
Election officials and legal scholars have said the country’s highest court needs to weigh in on the 14th Amendment when it comes to voting in presidential primaries.
In a decision that the justices acknowledged was “in unfamiliar territory,” Colorado became the first state to forbid Trump from running for president because of his candidacy.
The Colorado Republican Party appealed the opinion from the state court to the Supreme Court. The group which brought the ballot challenge in Colorado, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has already asked the court to move quickly to give voters the answers they need.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “Multifront Lawfare Campaign” to Steal the 2024 Presidential Campaign: The Maine Supreme Court ruled Donald Trump Eligible to Run as a Former President
Trump has cast the decisions as part of a larger effort by his political opponents to interfere with his 2024 presidential campaign. He faces more than 90 criminal charges in four venues, including federal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 contest he loss.
The Democratic secretary of state in Maine ruled that Trump was ineligible under the 14th amendment. Trump appealed that decision in the Maine state court system.
The top court in Colorado ruled that Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot because he was a former president.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, described the lawsuits in a statement last week as “bad-faith, politically motivated attempts to steal the 2024 election,” claiming that Democrats had “launched a multifront lawfare campaign to disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters and interfere in the election.” Mr. Cheung did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Republican presidential primary elections and caucuses are taking place this month and the polls show Donald Trump with a sizeable lead over his opponents.
Those lawsuits can generally be divided into three categories: Mr. Castro’s lawsuits, almost all of which have been filed in federal court; state challenges filed by two nonprofit organizations; and one-off cases brought in state or federal courts by local residents. Maine is one of a few places where voters have challenged Mr. Trump’s eligibility with the election commission or a secretary of state. In California and New York, some elected officials have written letters pushing for elections officers in those states to disqualify or consider disqualifying the former president.
Most establishment Democrats have not publicly embraced the cause. President Biden said after the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that it was “self-evident” that Mr. Trump had supported an insurrection, but that it was up to the judiciary to determine his eligibility for the ballot. Several Democratic secretaries of state have included Mr. Trump on their candidate lists and even had the courts decide whether or not he was eligible to run.