Is it possible that Donald Trump could be legally barred from holding office even if he isn’t convicted - indeed, before he is even tried - for alleged offences arising from January 6?
Some law professors think so. But what would you expect from these bleeding-heart, snowflake, SJW cucks who belong to the (checks notes) Federalist Society?
Prominent conservative legal scholars are increasingly raising a constitutional argument that 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency because of his actions to overturn the previous presidential election result.
The latest salvo came Saturday in The Atlantic magazine, from liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig, the former federal appellate judge and prominent conservative, who argue the 14th Amendment disqualifies the former president from returning to the Oval Office.
“The people who wrote the 14th Amendment were not fools. They realized that if those people who tried to overturn the country, who tried to get rid of our peaceful transitions of power are again put in power, that would be the end of the nation, the end of democracy,” Tribe told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union” on Sunday.
[…]
Just last week, two members of the Federalist Society, a legal organization that has substantial sway among conservative legal thinkers, released a law review article making a similar argument.
“In our view, on the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack,” law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “The case for disqualification is strong.”
In writing about Trump’s speech from the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, to his supporters who then overran the Capitol, Baude and Paulsen said Trump delivered a “general and specific message” that the election was stolen, calling on the crowd to take immediate action to block the transfer of power before falling silent for hours as the insurrection progressed.
“Trump’s deliberate inaction renders his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, because it makes it even less plausible (if it was ever plausible) that the crowd’s reaction was all a big mistake or misunderstanding,” they write.
The law professors argued current and former officeholders who took part in supporting or planning the efforts to overturn the election for Trump should also be “stringently scrutinized” under the Constitution should they seek bids for future public office.
Baude and Paulsen also noted that Trump’s “overall course of conduct disqualifies him” from eligibility as a candidate, regardless of whether he is convicted of criminal charges related to the 2020 election – which he now faces in Georgia state court and in federal court – or whether he is held liable in a major civil conspiracy lawsuit related to the attack.
“If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency,” the law review article said.
The pair also looked at the historical intentions of this section of the 14th Amendment, which barred Confederates after the Civil War from holding office again.
If someone had proposed this immediately after the Beer Belly Putsch, I might be on board with it. (Indeed, I repeatedly proposed removing Trump from office under the 25th Amendment when he was still in the White House, because he was so obviously incapable of carrying out his duties.)
But two and a half years after the fact?
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