The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should bar Donald Trump from serving as President again, a lawyer argued Monday in a Colorado courtroom.
The advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the lawsuit in September, seeking to remove Trump from the ballot in Colorado under the 14th Amendment due to his alleged involvement in the riot that occurred in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. The group argues that Trump violated the clause about “insurrection or rebellion.”
Ratified in 1868, following the War Between the States and during the Reconstruction Era, the 14th Amendment “granted citizenship to all persons ‘born or naturalized in the United States,’ including formerly enslaved people, and provided all citizens with ‘equal protection under the laws,’ extending the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states,” according to a U.S. Senate website.
The amendment also included a provision, in Section 3, barring any person from serving as President or Vice President or as a member of Congress, or holding any civil office, if that person previously “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” as a civil official.
“Trump incited a violent mob to attack our Capitol, to stop the peaceful transition of power,” Eric Olson, an attorney representing CREW, reportedly said during an opening statement before a Colorado District Court judge, according to Reuters.
Prior to the riot at the nation’s capitol, Trump delivered remarks on the Ellipse on January 6. During that speech, Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Trump’s legal team argued that those words, which included the call to “peacefully…make your voices heard,” were not a call to incite violence. Olson, however, claimed that Trump “summoned and organized the mob” to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Scott Gessler, a lawyer representing Trump in the case, further argued that disqualifying Trump would set a dangerous precedent based on “legal theories that have never been embraced by a state or federal court.”
“People should be able to run for office and shouldn’t be punished for their speech,” Gessler reportedly told the court during his opening statement.
Similar attempts to prevent Trump from appearing on the next presidential ballot are underway in other states.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has publicly opposed measures to remove the former president from the ballot. “Denying voters the opportunity to choose is fundamentally un-American,” Raffensperger wrote in a September op-ed to The Wall Street Journal.
“Since our founding, Americans have believed that a government is just when it has earned the consent of the governed. Taking away the ability to choose – or object to – the eligibility of candidates eliminates that consent for slightly less than half of the country.”
