Experts explain why efforts to bump Trump from ballots uphold U.S. Constitution

Critics may argue moves to bump Donald Trump from state presidential ballots threaten the Constitution, but one group of legal experts say those insurrectionist challenges are the best way to uphold it.

Obama administration “ethics czar” Norm Eisen, attorney Jeff Kolb, and Florida prosecutor Andrew Warren published Wednesday their defense of the 14th Amendment challenges to the former president’s eligibility to run again in 2024.

“Jan. 6 was an insurrection, Trump was a central part of it, and so the law and the facts clearly favor disqualification,” the group wrote for Slate. “It is in the best tradition of American democracy to ask if the Constitution applies here—and to enforce it if it does.”

The trio issued this argument one week after the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether states such as Colorado and Maine can remove Trump from their ballots under the insurrectionist ban detailed in Section 3.

Critics including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and former Vice President Mike Pence and have called the challenges an attempt to “short-circuit the ballot box” and “antithetical” to democracy.

Eisen, Kolb, and Warren argue it’s a sign that democracy is alive and well.

“A democracy works only when its rules are enforced consistently, irrespective of whether doing so is controversial or easy,” they write.

Their lengthy analysis highlights several relevant rules and laws linked to the complicated cases, among them the various legal limits on who can, and who cannot, run for office.

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“Republicans aren’t caterwauling that it’s an anti-democratic travesty that they can’t vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger for president because he is foreign-born, and Democrats aren’t complaining that Rep. Maxwell Frost is ineligible to be a candidate in the 2024 presidential election because he is under age 35,” they write.

But there is one key difference, they say.

“An insurrectionist in the Oval Office would be far more dangerous than a President Schwarzenegger.”

The group concedes there is no predicting how the Supreme Court will rule, but they argue the journey to the nation’s highest court will be worth the trip either way.

“Evaluating Trump’s candidacy in good faith under the disqualification clause is not antithetical to our democracy,” they conclude. “To the contrary, government striving to uphold the laws adopted by the people is our democracy.”

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