A growing number of legal scholars believe former President Donald Trump should be barred from returning to the White House because of his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Conservative J. Michael Luttig, a retired former federal judge, and liberal Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard Law School professor, wrote in The Atlantic Saturday that they believed that the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment now applied to Trump.
They argued that “conviction is irrelevant” as the former president has been charged four times, with two of the cases revolving around his attempts to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the ensuing attack on the U.S. Capitol, place (Trump) squarely within the scope of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to ever serve as president again. to serve,” said Luttig and Tribe. wrote in their Atlantic piece.
They pointed to several other legal scholars who had already come to the same conclusion, including William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, who wrote on the subject for a upcoming University of Pennsylvania Law Review editionas well as Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management.
Former President Donald Trump appears on Jan. 6 at the “Stop the Steal” rally ahead of the violent attack on the Capitol. A growing number of legal scholars believe he would be banned from the presidency for his actions that day, triggering the disqualification clause they say
Liberal constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe (left) and retired former federal judge J. Michael Luttig (right) appeared on the network Saturday with CNN’s Jim Acosta to discuss a piece they wrote for The Atlantic about how Trump has already been barred from the presidency
Baude and Paulsen are members of the conservative Federalist Society and they wrote that “the case for disqualification is strong.”
“In our opinion, based on the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from serving again as president (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overturning of the 2020 election and the events that led to the January 6 attack,’ wrote Baude and Paulsen.
Baude and Paulsen wrote that Trump delivered a “general and specific message” when he appeared before a crowd at the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse ahead of the violent attack on the Capitol.
His message there was that the election had been stolen and he called on the crowd to take immediate action to block the transfer of power.
Then he was silent for hours as the assault on the Capitol progressed.
“Trump’s willful inaction makes his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, as it becomes even less plausible (if it ever was plausible) that the public reaction was all a gross mistake or misunderstanding,” Baude and Paulsen wrote.
Luttig and Tribe argued that the disqualification clause—added to the Constitution after the Civil War as the South attempted to return former Confederates to Congress—works on its own.
The clause reads that those who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion … or (had) rendered aid or comfort to the enemies” who served in the government cannot serve again.
The scholars believe this means that Trump did not have to be convicted by the Senate when he was impeached a second time for inciting an insurrection for the disqualification clause to apply.
They also argue that he does not need to be convicted of the current charges related to January 6.
“The clause was intended to take immediate and immediate effect against those who betray their oath to the Constitution, either by taking up arms to overthrow our government or by waging war against our government by attempting to secure a presidential election.” through a bloodless coup d’état,” said Luttig. and Tribe wrote.
Tribe appeared together on CNN on Saturday and said Trump’s lawsuits didn’t matter.
He told CNN’s Jim Acosta that “people have to get used to the fact that no matter what happens in these very important trials against the president, according to the constitution’s own language, he’s just not eligible to run for president again.”
‘Stay tuned. This will be a story that lasts between now and the election,” Tribe also said.
On Sunday, their reading of the disqualification clause reverberated through the political universe.
Presidential hopeful former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson brought it up when he appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Kasie Hunt.
He told Hunt that he didn’t believe Trump would end up being the GOP nominee.
“But what I want to point out is that I’m not even sure he’s fit to be the next president of the United States,” he said. And so you can’t ask us to support someone who might not even be qualified under our constitution. And I refer to the 14th Amendment, which some legal scholars said disqualified him for his actions on January 6.”
Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, appearing in State of the Union after Hutchinson, pointed to the former Arkansas governor’s comments about the 14th Amendment and shared his concerns.
Cassidy said in the same interview that Trump should drop out of the race because the classified documents case is “almost a slam dunk.”
The Louisiana Republican called Hutchinson a “great guy,” noting that he said “some lawyers think he’s going to be disqualified on the 14th Amendment.”
“I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m not a lawyer — which means the people you see on that stage, one of them, will very likely be the presidential candidate,” Cassidy said, referring to how Trump plans skip the elections. the first Republican debate, to be held in Milwaukee on Wednesday.