Barring Trump from the ballot

OPINION:

Courts in Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota heard cases this week in an unprecedented — and disingenuous — bid to bar former President Donald Trump from appearing on those states’ ballots next November.

Backed by left-wing special interest groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the attorneys involved surely know that their cases lack a legal leg to stand on, much less a constitutional one. 

As has been seen in many recent judicial disputes involving the former president and his supporters, being right doesn’t mean the peril isn’t real. Partisan judges can cause untold mischief, raising the troubling possibility that one of these courts could venture into uncharted legal waters and allow political actors to throw a national election into chaos.

The ballot-access lawsuits are predicated on a never-before-contemplated application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in 1868 in the Civil War’s aftermath. The disqualification clause had the limited purpose of preventing federal and state lawmakers or judges who rejected their oath of office in joining the Confederacy from returning to hold any federal position. 

Proponents of the Colorado lawsuit are playing word games in an attempt to trigger the clause.

“Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and interfere with the peaceful transfer of power were part of an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States,” lawyer Mario Nicolais wrote. “By instigating this unprecedented assault on the American constitutional order, Trump violated his oath [of office] and disqualified himself under the Fourteenth Amendment from holding public office, including the Office of the President.”

Even if one takes such an argument at face value, the Democrats already charged Mr. Trump with “incitement of insurrection” related to the commotion at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After considering the charge in the second impeachment trial, the Senate voted to acquit the former president. The matter ought to have ended there.

Should a partisan state judge decide to accept the left-wing group’s preposterous hypothesis, it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court wouldn’t intervene, considering the havoc such a precedent would create in future elections.

As Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky explained, the “judges in those cases should understand that the text, history, and application of the 14th Amendment make it clear that they have no legal authority to take any such action.”

These special interest groups wouldn’t be fighting to erase Mr. Trump’s name from the ballot if they thought he would be easy to defeat next fall. To the contrary, they’d be out collecting petition signatures to preserve the former president’s place on it. 

The lawsuits are the real “unprecedented assault on the American constitutional order.” By deleting the name of a major political party candidate from consideration in battleground states, millions would be denied the opportunity to select the candidate of their choice, effectively disenfranchising them.

Nullifying the ability of millions to vote has more in common with sedition than a crowd of rowdy citizens parading through the Capitol. The republic survived Jan. 6 without skipping a beat. The same may not be true if partisan actors succeed in turning it into a one-party state.