Or just when conservatives find it convenient?
Fourteenth Amendment challenges (and counterchallenges) to Donald Trump’s disqualification for any public office in these United States are beginning to multiply. On its face, the post-Civil War constitutional amendment disqualifies Trump from running again for president over his involvement in the Jan. 6 attempted coup. Multiple conservative legal experts agree.
Activists have already challenged Trump’s eligibility in North Carolina and Florida.
And so? (CNN):
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, said earlier this week that he asked the state’s attorney general to examine the matter and advise him on the “provision’s potential applicability to the upcoming presidential election cycle.” The attorney general’s office said it was “carefully reviewing the legal issues.”
In the statement, Scanlan said he wasn’t taking a position on the disqualification question and was not “seeking to take certain action” but was going to study the matter in anticipation of lawsuits.
Oh, they’re coming (Associated Press):
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.
Just days ago in Michigan, “litigious activist Robert Davis” asked Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to declare Trump ineligible.
Michigan state Rep. Peter Meijer (R) declared in response, “This kind of asshattery would be immediately rejected as nonsense by serious people in normal times. I don’t give a damn what your ‘novel legal theory’ is- it will be far more corrosive to the body politic than whatever threat it is you think you’re ‘protecting’ the country from.”
Novel legal theory? Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse responds, “Six officials were barred under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment a century and a half ago. And a participant in Trump’s insurrection was disqualified from office last year.”
Julian Sanchez, a writer and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, replied, “It’s… not a ‘novel legal theory,’ it’s a 155-year-old constitutional provision that explicitly disqualifies people from federal office, and which a bunch of prominent conservative legal theorists believe applies squarely to Trump.”
“I’ll note the courts have already applied this to Jan 6 insurrectionists: A county commissioner in NM was removed from office under this clause, and his appeal was rejected by the state’s supreme court,” Sanchez concludes. “So apparently not entirely unserious.”
New Mexico’s state Supreme Court denied former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin’s appeal in February.
Sanchez adds, “The ‘novel legal theory’ would be that an express Constitutional clause doesn’t apply when it’s politically inconvenient.”
The Queen of Hearts’ rules
Constitution, shmonstitution, say the pocket Constitution-clutchers. The law is what MAGA Republicans say it is. Before there were MAGA Republicans there were T-party Republicans. Same difference, as they say. The law is what they think it should be.
But that’s always been the case for conservatives: preferential treatment for the preferred. And they get to say who’s preferred. Cue Frank Wilhoit:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
“How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held,” one-time Republican Stuart Stevens wrote in “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. “