Legal academics are divided on the new popular theory that former President Donald Trump can be removed from ballots under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. While I respect many of the academics who view this as a credible interpretation, I have long opposed it as textually and historically flawed. In addition to some exaggerated claims of precedent, I view the theory as one of the most dangerous in my lifetime. One thing, however, we agree upon: it is time for the federal courts to rule on this theory to bring clarity to the election. That may now occur in West Virginia where Attorney General Patrick Morrisey wants a federal court to throw out a lawsuit attempting to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in the state. What is most striking about the filing is the accusation of judge-shopping by advocates like John Anthony Castro in seeking to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in the state.
I have previously addressed the constitutional basis for this claim. It is, in my view, wildly out of sync with the purpose of the amendment, which followed an actual rebellion, the Civil War.
The 14th Amendment bars those who took the oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” It then adds that that disqualification can extend to those who have “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The “disqualification clause” was written after the 39th Congress convened in December 1865 when many members were shocked to see Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, waiting to take a seat with an array of other former Confederate senators and military officers.
Justice Edwin Reade of the North Carolina Supreme Court later explained, “[t]he idea [was] that one who had taken an oath to support the Constitution and violated it, ought to be excluded from taking it again.”
According to these experts, Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and Trump gave “aid and comfort” to those who engaged in it by spreading election fraud claims and not immediately denouncing the violence.
Polls have shown that most of the public view Jan. 6 for what it was: a protest that became a riot. One year after the riot, CBS News mostly downplayed and ignored the result of its own poll showing that 76 percent viewed it for what it was, as a “protest gone too far.” The view that it was an actual “insurrection” was far less settled, with almost half rejecting the claim, a division breaking along partisan lines.
Nevertheless, Democrats have claimed that the 14th Amendment prevents Trump from running because he supported an “insurrection or rebellion.”
They have argued that this long dormant clause can be used to block not just Trump but 120 Republicans in Congress from running for office.
The lawsuit could offer a long needed judicial review and an avenue to the Supreme Court for a final ruling. Yet, what was most notable was this paragraph in the filing on the motives and means used by Castro:
“Plaintiff John Anthony Castro filed this lawsuit as part of a multi-state litigation effort that he dubs “Operation Deadlock.” John Anthony Castro (@realJohnACastro), X (Sept. 20, 2023, 2:17 PM), https://bit.ly/48GyE9y. Castro’s supposed operation involves filing suit after suit— roughly two dozen so far—seeking to disqualify President Donald Trump from running for election again. Castro will then “sidelin[e] and neutraliz[e] the influence of conservative judges” by “nonsuit[ing] those cases” that are not assigned to “Obama-appointed or Clinton appointed judges.” Katherine Fung, Donald Trump’s Lawyers Get Stretched Even Thinner, NEWSWEEK (Sept. 19, 2023, 11:22 AM), https://bit.ly/3S2a25B; see, e.g., Notice of Dismissal, Castro v. Henderson, No. 2:23-cv-00617 (D. Utah Sept. 27, 2023), ECF No. 14 (Castro dismissing his suit after it was reassigned to a judge appointed by President Trump); but see, e.g., In re Fieger, No. 97-1359, 1999 WL 717991 (6th Cir. Sept. 10, 1999) (affirming sanctions against attorney who had “dismissed [his] cases so that he could select the judge”). Castro evidently hopes these efforts will “completely bankrupt [President Trump] by next summer.” John Anthony Castro (@realJohnACastro), X (Sept. 27, 2023, 8:40 PM), https://bit.ly/45gxpLq.”
Castro is running for the Republican presidential nomination. Recently, the Supreme Court refused to hear one of Castro’s cases.
Castro has been open about forum and judge shopping to get liberal, Democratic judges to rule against Trump. Castro tweeted:
“The fight is far from being over. We’re going to get the liberal 9th Circuit to kick Trump off the ballot in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. Coupled with the 1st Circuit kicking him off the Maine ballot, there’s ZERO path to 270. The Supreme Court can deny to hear the case but appellate courts cannot. I’m still pursuing decisions in the liberal appellate courts and there’s a full blown trial scheduled for October 20 in New Hampshire and a bench trial in Arizona on October 31.”
I tend to favor broad standing rules, but Castro’s open effort to secure review from liberal, Democratic judges should offend not only these jurists but most Americans. Castro received a J.D. from the University of New Mexico and LLM from Georgetown University.
Courts have universally denounced judge shopping. Most, like the federal court in northern Illinois, denounce the practice: “No one should be able to manipulate the assignment system in order to determine in advance which judge will get a case where the assignment is by lot.”
Obviously “forum shopping” does occur. Lawyers will seek to file in the most favorable jurisdiction, including prosecutors. Yet, I have never seen a lawyer openly discussing the manipulation of filings in search of liberal judges to achieve a particular result. The filing is accusing Castro of actually withdrawing lawsuits when he receives a judge who is not reliably liberal.
Castro must realize that he is insulting these liberal judges and making this already novel challenge even more difficult. However, it is an example of using cases to appeal to the court of public opinion. Castro knows that such raw political moves will thrill many in this age of rage.
For advocates of the 14th Amendment theory, Castro could not be a worse figure to move this claim into the courts. He adds a noxious means to a novel theory to bar Trump from ballots. Of course, this is all being done by advocates who claim that they are defending democracy but denying the ability of others to vote for one of the leading candidates for the presidency.
Folks – calm down. the 3rd part of the 14th Amendment was legally removed in 1872. See the Amnesty Act of 1872. It has a wikipedia page.
Quite frankly, I find it ironic that the people who want to use the 14th Amendment to prevent Trump from being on the November 2024 ballot, are protecting the Dems in Congress who orchestrated the “whole” emergency of an insurrection, requiring the just put in place emergency rules to be followed by the Congress on voting on the electoral college ballots.
The true insurrectionist is Nancy Pelosi and her cabal.
Ms. Pelosi refused Trump’s offer of National Guard help on January 6, 2021.
Ms. Pelosi was responsible for security of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Ms. Pelosi was in charge of setting the security boundaries of the Capitol, ensnaring many long time visitors in a trap.
Ms. Pelosi was in charge of rule changes affecting the electoral college ballot votes.
Ms. Pelosi is on video record saying she would punch Trump in the face, Mr. Trump still being the sitting President at the time. This alone is punishable by law.
Ms. Pelosi did in fact commit an insurrection on January 6, 2021, by her actions, and anyone, and everyone who did nothing to stop these actions, who agreed with these actions, who participated in these actions, did in fact violate their oath of office, and as such are treasonous in that they aided and abetted Joe Biden, a agent of china, to become the current resident of the white House.
Someday I’ll tell you how I really feel . .
I believe the actual reason for the evacuation was a very carefully timed and coordinated “bomb scare” caused by the amazingly timed finding of fake bombs at the RNC and DNC. Also amazing is that of all the persons the FBI was able to identify and locate, the FBI could not find the bomber? Even though there is film of the person showing exact time and location the person used a cell phone. Especially considering it was in the early morning hours with few other persons present!!
The 14th Amendment does not apply to the president – Trump or any other. Read the constitution in context of the other sections. This is so obvious the claim is ridiculous on its face. But this is an example of our failing educational institutions.
“person . . . 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.” Where is the office of the president mentioned?
The president BTW is not an officer of the United States. Four provisions of the Constitution use the phrase “Officers . . . of the United States”: the Appointments Clause, the Impeachment Clause, the Oaths Clause and the Commissions Clause. Read them again and you will see that the president is not an officer of the United States. In a Supreme Court case Justice Roberts notes that people do not vote for officers of the United States. There are other Supreme Court cases to look at as well that draw the distinction between the president and officer of the United States.
Fools who can’t win plan to cheat the majority. These are the real insurrectionists.
We hope you’ll find something interesting here:
Possible volcanic winter, bunkers are useless, Boeing has the global solution!
REGULAR drills & Earth lasers’ plasma shield by Boeing, not only can repel space electricity that provenly stimulates magma (Ebisuzaki, 2011) & dissolve storms (Univ. of Geneva), but it CAN also prevent chaos by a devastating global blackout/1300 nuclear reactors’ blasting by asteroid explosion (as in Tunguska-1908 & Chelyabinsk-2013) or a solar storm hit! TWELVE times near-miss extinction so far: 1972, 1989, 1991, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2012, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 https://GlobalBlackoutPrevention.wordpress.com
Lay off the LSD bub.
Cambridge asks magma mitigation to prevent annihilating super-eruptions. You wish what? http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02177-x
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2022/risk-of-volcano-catastrophe-a-roll-of-the-dice-say-experts
Had enough yet? At what point do the righteous, educated and moral American people rise up united against these corrupt global elites? Our form of government is solid, it is the self serving corrupt clowns running the show that need to go. They are complicit, they are corrupted, it goes far beyond our own reach, follow the money.
Arise America or they will bend you till you break.
Had enough yet? At what point do the righteous, educated and moral American people rise up united against these corrupt global elites?
You expect Americans to take action in the flesh!? take to the streets!? defend the nation for its freedoms!? seriously? You fascist
They’re all idiots. An insurrection can only occur against the executive branch of government. The head of government. Governments are overthrown by taking down the a president a prime minister a dictator. Insurrections cannot and do not occur at the legislative level. This is just stupidity. When are lawyers like Turley going to explain this to these morons. And furthermore Section 3 cannot apply to the sitting president. This is idiocy. Section 3 was designed to prevent sitting Governors and Congress from conspiring to overthrow the federal executive branch following the civil war. It’s never been tested. It’s probably unconstitutional.
: Next time someone tries to sell you the “insurrection” narrative, ask them to explain how trespassing leads to control of a country.
Or look at the news from Israel
That is what an actual insurrection looks like
Separately we have learned that our public health experts and the politicians they worked for knew the measures they advocated to suppress Covid would not and could not work
Government infringement on our rights requires an actual public benefit not claims based on lies
The lockdown of the capitol was unconstitutional
And was one of many unconstitutional and illegal acts by democrat to rig the election
That is closer to insurrection than anything trump or his supporters did
The oath keepers and proud boys have been fed run and controlled for YEARS now. I guess most everybody here still believes Whitmer was almost kidnapped by a nefarious plot. (THE FEDS RAN THE ENTIRE PLOT YOU DUMMIES.)
The general tards here are so far behind the governments and their covert actors it is amazing, since you are all on the internet and most presumably in the USA, and if not aware of TOR usage.
When your government openly declares you the biggest threat, terrorists, because you aren’t a demoncrat or a Trump hater if not demoncrat, what do you think they are doing and not declaring publicly. Think about it just a little bit sometime.
Castro entered politics seeking the Democratic Party nomination for Webb County Court of Commissioners in 2004, receiving less than 500 votes and coming in last.
“. . . the new popular theory . . .”
Theory-divorced-from-reality #10, all rationalized by the desire to “get Trump.” Nothing says “democracy” like lying, cheating, and stealing to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.
Besides the obvious injustice to Trump and his supporters, imagine the mental contortions needed to spin such fantastic “theories.”
Professor Turley.. good look! I believe we can agree that the folks who are trying to use the 14th Amendment to fit their political purposes are the same folks who insist on calling the riot an insurrection..! and indeed, making up a whole new meaning for the word ‘insurrection…’ given that this riot did not fit the original historical core attributes… Those of us who heard every speech given by DT heard him using the word ‘protest..’ – something these folks ignore… They also ignore the video tapes which show a lot of peaceful ‘insurrectionists’ calming staying inside the tourist cordons inside the Capitol.. on and on……
As the Dems continue to desperately try to disqualify Trump, it is akin to the deck chairs continuing to be rearranged. But the ship is going down. The Titanic that once was a great America will soon sink below the waves. When our government officials can’t come together and uniformly condemn the slaughter of innocents, we have lost the moral high ground. People like the Squad who continue to be elected and the academics who brainwash our future leaders, are the icebergs. And the usual idiot Americans who follow them are the inept captain of the ship. How sad. How horrific.
We Dems aren’t trying to disqualify trump. We Dems are ascerting that trump participated in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. Ergo, he’s not qualified to be president. Hell, trump isn’t qualified to be president of the United States after the chaos of his administration.
You Dems are trying to disqualify the United States and make it into China. Your sophomoric, high school level copy/paste comments do not help your arguments, not that my intelligent, analytical, laser-like focus comment will convince you to change your ways. BTW, is the crack that Hunter Biden supplies you pure stuff or, as many suspect, laden with lead paint chips?
We Dems are ascerting (sic) that…..
Go back to high school then college, learn how to spell, write well and engage others using persuasive arguments. Till then, youre just a troll and not the brightest at that in the troll farm
“Chaos” called by corruption, sabotage, propaganda and weak-minded people.
Look at the clown folks, and there you have it.
The Trump administration was the best thing to happen to America in 40 years. The economy was booming (not today!) and the world was a much safer place (again, not today!). As President Trump asked for your vote in his original campaign, he also asked, “What do you have to lose?” Mr. Castro must be repudiated and made to account for his misuse of the legal system. Anyone out there know how to make this happen?
Translation= we are going to lose, so we are going to disqualify the opponent. No insurrection, barely a riot…it was mostly peaceful. Heck they didn’t even loot all the liquor stores….
This is it. The Big One. Ain’t nobody gonna back down. Americans murdered. Americans held hostage. Jews murdered en masse. Iran will not suffer loss of face.
We have a president stricken with dementia and his vice-president is a hip-hop teeny bopper.
Doesn’t the 14th also say explicitly that Congress makes the rules about it? If congress hasn’t provided a method to be off the ballot….then judges can’t usurp (rem birth certificate). Moreover this is the essential “political question” and hence even the shopped judges have to punt it.
That’s not what it says. It says anyone who holds an office of the United States and who has taken an oath to the Constitution for that office, is excluded from holding any office of trust and responsibility again. Trump can’t lawfully and honestly even take the oath of office, because he has already attacked the very Constitution he swore to defend.
It also says Congress has the authority to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment (see section 5). Congress has done so – it has passed a statute that makes it so that anyone engaging in a rebellion or insurrection is guilty of a federal crime, and that anyone so convicted is incapable of holding any office under the United States. See 18 U.S.C. 2383. Now that Congress has passed that law in order to implement Section 3, that is the procedure that governs disqualification under Section 3. IOW, a conviction under Section 2383 is a necessary predicate to disqualification.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
“Lawmakers to probe if U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine, abandoned in Afghanistan are in Hamas’ hands”
https://justthenews.com/government/security/satlawmakers-seek-probe-whether-us-weapons-sent-ukraine-afghanistan-hamas-hands
“Judge overseeing Mar-a-Lago case cuts hearing short, admonishes special counsel prosecuting Trump”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/judge-overseeing-mar-a-lago-case-cuts-hearing-short-admonishes-special-counsel-prosecuting-trump/ar-AA1i7Pz3
“Eyal Waldman, the Israeli high-tech magnate, astounded the tech industry and the entire Arab world by creating research and development centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, all while employing hundreds of Palestinian developers. On Saturday, Hamas murdered his daughter Daniel”
https://twitter.com/raz_sauber/status/1712429835656581263?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1712429835656581263%7Ctwgr%5Ead2690d70341147a06b1950ffb92e8dbe0f362c9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F611052%2F
They are killers.
Hamas terrorists were ordered to target Israeli schools, ‘kill as many people as possible’ in sneak attack plans: report
https://nypost.com/2023/10/13/hamas-attack-plans-instruct-to-kill-as-many-people-as-possible/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20231013?&utm_source=sailthru&lctg=64f25f6285efb3c7330a0cb9&utm_term=NYP%20-%20News%20Alerts
Hamas terrorists seen holding kidnapped Israeli children, babies in vile footage
https://nypost.com/2023/10/13/hamas-seen-holding-kidnapped-israeli-children-babies-in-footage/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20231013?&utm_source=sailthru&lctg=64f25f6285efb3c7330a0cb9&utm_term=NYP%20-%20News%20Alerts
The problem:
https://twitter.com/kylenabecker/status/1712506046135091634
The solution:
Beautiful.
Alan….so powerful, so gorgeous! I’ve heard it many times…but hearing it now is such a meaningful experience.
That’s a great campaign promise, if you’re running for president of the psych ward.
I couldn’t care less what you think about the Bidens. HB’s and Menendez’s conduct is not “virtually-identical conduct,” which is what the 7:33 PM claimed.
LOL — you’re quibbling over the definition of “virtually.” Get a productive hobby.