The Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear a challenge brought by a long-shot Republican presidential candidate seeking to disqualify former President Donald Trump from holding office over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
John Castro had asked the justices to determine if he has standing to challenge another candidate’s ability to run for office. The case was Castro v. Trump.
Mr. Castro lost in a lower court on the standing issue in his argument that the Constitution forbids Mr. Trump to hold office following the Capitol riot. He said in his petition to the justices that his campaign would be injured if Mr. Trump remains on the ballot.
“A primary candidate has judicial standing to bring a claim challenging the eligibility of a fellow primary candidate for competitive injury in the form of a diminution of votes and/or fundraising if the primary candidate believes that the fellow primary candidate is ineligible to hold public office and to prevent actions irreconcilable with the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote.
It would have taken four justices to vote in favor of reviewing the dispute for oral arguments to be scheduled.
A number of lawsuits alleging Mr. Trump should be disqualified from the 2024 ballot have been filed across the country.
Court watchers say it is possible that the justices will eventually have to consider the matter, specifically if Section 3 of the 14th Amendment precludes the former president from being elected, whether for the White House or any other public office.
The clause essentially says anyone who leads an insurrection or rebellion against the government is disqualified from holding public office. It was ratified following the Civil War.
Legal scholars have debated whether Mr. Trump could run for president following the Jan. 6 riot.
Laurence Tribe, liberal legal analyst and Harvard University professor emeritus, said he believes the 14th Amendment is clear and would be too big of a hurdle for Mr. Trump to surmount, reasoning he shouldn’t be able to run for reelection.
“You are disqualified, period,” Mr. Tribe said on CNN. “So all of the charges against the president, which at the moment don’t happen to include insurrection, are really beside the point.”
Not all legal experts agree with that analysis of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The House can vote to re-qualify someone by a two-thirds vote, the section notes.
The clause has only been used a handful of times since the 1860s, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Trump, who is facing a number of indictments, has not been charged with or convicted of leading an insurrection.
He’s facing one federal trial over the handling of classified documents in southern Florida and another over election fraud charges in Washington, both probes led by special counsel Jack Smith.
District attorneys in New York have charged the former president with falsifying business records in a payment related to silencing porn star Stormy Daniels about an alleged affair, and a Georgia district attorney is prosecuting Mr. Trump for challenging the state’s 2020 election results.
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in The Federalist, that if it was clear Mr. Trump had led an insurrection, the Justice Department could have acted on a referral to prosecute the former president from the Jan. 6 House committee, which investigated the riot.
And the Senate could have voted to convict Mr. Trump following his second impeachment trial, Mr. Yoo added.
“The Senate’s acquittal is the only official finding by a federal or state institution on the question of whether Trump committed insurrection. The failure of the special counsel to charge insurrection and the Senate to convict in the second impeachment highlights a serious flaw in the academic theory of disqualification,” Mr. Yoo wrote, along with co-author Robert Delahunty, a fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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