The latest in a series of attempts to use a little-known clause in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to claim that Trump is ineligible to be president because of his conduct after losing the 2020 election, a group of voters filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to remove former President Donald Trump from the Minnesota ballot.
The lawsuit, which was filed with the aid of the liberal election and campaign finance reform group Free Speech for People, claims that Donald J. Trump engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid and comfort to the government’s enemies after taking an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution.
According to Section 3 from the Civil War era, “No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,… who, having previously taken an oath… as an officer of the United States, to uphold the Constitution of the United States, shall have participated in insurrection or rebellion in opposition to the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
This is the second lawsuit of its kind to be brought this month. Another voter coalition supported by the left-leaning watchdog group CREW filed a lawsuit last week to remove Trump from Colorado’s ballot. Other states, including Florida and Michigan, have already filed similar challenges.
Trump has decried the actions as “nonsense” and “election interference.”
The legal action was required, according to Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People, because Trump “incited a violent insurrection that fought the U.S. Capitol, threatened the assassination of the Vice President as well as congressional leaders, alongside disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history.”
“To safeguard the country from individuals like Trump, our forefathers adopted the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause because they knew that if they were given the opportunity to retake office, oath-breaking insurrectionists would do it worse. Election officials are required to abide by this constitutional duty because Trump is legally prohibited from voting, Fein continued.
The Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon is the target of the Minnesota lawsuit, which does not mention Trump as a defendant. Prior to this, the Democrat had rejected letters from Free Speech for People pleading with him to act.
“It is not within the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State’s legal purview to look into a candidate’s qualification for office. The major political parties will provide our office with the names of potential presidential candidates by January 2, 2024, for the Presidential Nomination Primary. Unless a court orders otherwise, those nominations will be listed on the ballot for the election on March 5, 2024, Simon said in a statement last week.
The document asserts that Simon does have the power to act, and it asks the court to declare Trump ineligible for office and compel Simon to keep his name off the ballots for the primary and general elections.
For the benefit of Minnesota’s voters, Simon’s office said in a statement that it hoped the court would find a solution to the dispute so that the elections in 2024 may be conducted in a fair and orderly manner.
Requests for a response from a Trump campaign representative were not immediately entertained.
Trump had previously mostly disregarded talk of the moves to have him removed from office, but this month he has been more vociferous in publicly opposing them and has moved to have his lawyers get involved in the Colorado case.
Trump claimed last week that the law is on his side in a post on his social media site, Truth Social. “Almost all legal experts agree that the 14th Amendment has a foundation in law and no validity in light of the impending 2024 Presidential Election. It’s just another “trick” the radical left’s communists, marxists, and fascists are doing, similar to election interference, he added.
However, several legal experts, including some well-known conservative ones, have suggested that the endeavor might be successful.