The 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump [View all]

[AverageOldGuy]

As has been pointed out in other DU entries as well as in a few other opinion sites, there is a body of opinion that Trump is disqualified from office by the 14th Amendment.

The 14th is one of three post-Civil War amendments that have an interesting and some would say "checkered" history:
-- the 13th abolished slavery (but did it really?).
-- the 14th cleaned up a lot of Constitutional vagaries -- who is a citizen, rights of citizens, rights before the law, etc.
-- the 15th which prohibited denying citizens the right to vote because of their race (of course, the old Jim Crow laws worked around that and now Republicans are re-instating Jim Crow, just by another name).

This month, former federal judge Michael Luttig and law professor Laurence Tribe co-authored an Atlantic magazine piece arguing that the 14th Amendment prohibits Trump -- and a host of others -- from ever holding office. Here's a link to the article, though it may be behind a paywall.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/donald-trump-constitutionally-prohibited-presidency/675048/

In their article, Luttig and Tribe give a lot of credit to a forthcoming article in the Univ. of Penn. Law Review, a pre-publication copy of which is available in PDF -- all 126 pages of it.

Here is what Luttig and Tribe say:

We were immensely gratified to see that a richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal has recently come to the same conclusion that we had and is attracting well-deserved attention outside a small circle of scholars—including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management, whose encouragement inspired us to write this piece. The evidence laid out by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” available as a preprint, is momentous. Sooner or later, it will influence, if not determine, the course of American constitutional history—and American history itself.

I tried to post a link to the U. of Penn. Law Review article, however, it is a looooong URL, so, here's a link to an abstract of the law review article that has a link to the PDF at the top of the page. If you don't want to read all 126 pages, read the introduction that precedes the table of contents then go to page 124 and read the last two pages. I'm over halfway through the law review article and while a lot of legal writing is deadly reading, this one is clear, to the point, and makes sense.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751
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Maybe if we started pounding on our members of Congress . . .

Meanwhile, the fact of the Atlantic article and the Law Review article may suggest that something is stirring below the surface.