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Recently filed state lawsuits may be the way that we find out in the courts whether former President Donald Trump is eligible for office under the 14th Amendment. Indeed, those suits have just become even more important, with secretaries of state from both parties declining to take Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot pursuant to the amendment’s disqualification clause.
Writing in The Washington Post this week, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, called it “misguided” to think it’s “up to secretaries of state to determine whether Donald Trump can ever serve in elective office again.” Whether he’s eligible to run, Benson wrote, “is a decision not for secretaries of state but for the courts.”
Benson’s deferral came after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also wrote to explain why he felt it wasn’t up to him, with the Republican penning a Wall Street Journal piece headlined “I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot.” As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown pointed out, it wasn’t a great argument on Raffensperger’s part.
Whatever the merits of those secretaries’ views, they reinforce that we likely won’t get the answer to the crucial disqualification question through them.
Whatever the merits of those secretaries’ views, they reinforce that we likely won’t get the answer to the crucial disqualification question through them.
As a reminder of what’s at stake, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars from office anyone who took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States but then has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
So how will we find out the answer to the question in court, if we ever do?
I noted earlier this week that we’re closer to finding out through those state lawsuits — filed in Colorado and Minnesota — what the courts think about Trump’s eligibility following the Jan. 6 insurrection. But just because we’re closer doesn’t mean we’re going to find out the answer soon in these suits, which were filed by voters challenging the former president’s eligibility.
Whatever the answer, it may well have been more efficient to find out by way of a secretary of state keeping Trump off the ballot — if in fact they believed he was ineligible, of course.
But for now, it looks like the answer may have to come through voters themselves in these lawsuits.