As former President Donald Trump dominates the Republican presidential primary, some liberal groups and legal experts contend that a rarely used clause of the Constitution prevents him from being president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The 14th Amendment bars from office anyone who once took an oath to uphold the Constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it. A growing number of legal scholars say the post-Civil War clause applies to Trump after his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraging his backers to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Two liberal nonprofits pledge court challenges should states’ election officers place Trump on the ballot despite those objections.
The effort is likely to trigger a chain of lawsuits and appeals across several states that ultimately would lead to the U.S. Supreme Court, possibly in the midst of the 2024 primary season. The matter adds even more potential legal chaos to a nomination process already roiled by the front-runner facing four criminal trials.
It’ll be interesting to see how the courts play this out. Usually the determination of whether someone did or did not engage in an illegal activity is upon conviction by a jury - innocent until proven guilty. Consequences cannot be rendered until that point.
Trump hasn’t (yet) been charged with insurrection specifically, so a conviction on the existing charges likely wouldn’t trigger the 14th Amendments restriction.
“Giving aid or support” could be an interesting argument though, because a few of the J6 participants have been convicted of “seditious conspiracy”, which could maybe fall under the definition of rebellion, and Trump has certainly spoken spoken in support of the participants in general.
I look forward to reading some riveting decisions over the next year.
You’re forgetting about civil law. You can face legal consequences without ever being charged with a crime. And nothing in the amendment says a criminal conviction is required to be someone from office.
Criminal cases are ones in which the dispute exists between a private citizen and the government, which is to say that the government has accused the citizen of breaking the governments laws. The government must prove its case beyond a shadow of a doubt, but once it has done so penalties can include the loss of freedom, as the law defines.
Civil cases are disputes between private citizens, one accusing the other of some wrong. Private citizens do not have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, just present a preponderance of evidence. Because civil cases don’t judge the breaking of law, penalties are much less harsh, and revolve around compensating the wounded party for the wrong indicates by the evidence.
Insurrection and rebellion are crimes that, by definition, could only ever be commit against a government. As such they would necessarily have to be tried as criminal cases, and a conviction secured before invoking any loss of freedom as punishment (and on such a conviction, loss of a political campaign would be the least of these).
It is theoretically possible that the federal government could sue Trump for damages from J6, but for that case to be relevant to the 14th amendment it would have to provide evidence that the event that day was indeed an insurrection or rebellion directed by him. That moots the point of a civil suit, however, because if the government had that sort of evidence, it could charge him criminally instead.