State's Top Election Official Considers Barring Trump from Critical GOP Primary
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is contemplating barring Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot in the coming state primary using a flawed interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Scanlan, an establishment Republican, says he has received letters urging him to use the U.S. Constitution to block Trump from the ballot in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, which is only five months away.
“Not being a lawyer and not wanting to make a decision in a vacuum, I will be soliciting some legal opinions on what is appropriate or not before I make any decision,” Scanlan told The Boston Globe on Friday.
At the heart of the matter is the claim promulgated by liberals that Trump “incited insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, and that that makes him ineligible to run for office again under the 14th Amendment, Section 3.
This amendment was enacted in 1868, only a few years after the Civil War, and was meant to prevent former Confederate politicians and officers from holding federal office.
Scanlan tried to play both sides of the issue by saying he isn’t sure if Trump really did incite any insurrections.
“I view the violence as being a really unfortunate event in our history,” he said, according to the Globe. “I don’t know that I’m really qualified to say whether that was an ‘insurrection’ or not. I think that is for the courts to decide.”
The fact is, even as the Democratic lawfare machine has thrown four indictments at the former president, none of them has been for “insurrection.” So not only has Trump not been convicted of insurrection, but he hasn’t even been charged with it.
For that matter, none of the people indicted over the Jan. 6 riot have been charged with “sedition,” either!
Still, in a novel reading of Section 3, former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig and Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe claimed in The Atlantic that Trump can still be disqualified from the presidency under the 14th.
“The disqualification clause operates independently of any … criminal proceedings,” the pair said.
“The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”
And, according to ABC News, Federalist Society members William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen recently wrote in the Pennsylvania Law Review that election officials are required to bar Trump from the ballot.
“No official should shrink from these duties. It would be wrong — indeed, arguably itself a breach of one’s constitutional oath of office — to abandon one’s responsibilities of faithful interpretation, application, and enforcement of Section Three,” the two wrote.
Not every legal scholar agrees.
Political science professor Kevin Wagner told ABC that “there is some question about what it means to be engaged in insurrection or rebellion and how that is defined. The challenge for us is that historically, it hasn’t been well-defined.”
The problem, then, is that what qualifies as an insurrection is a matter of opinion.
“There is dispute and people feel strongly [that] what happened [on Jan. 6] was essentially an insurrection … but others have suggested that this was a protest that may have gotten out of hand — and may have even become criminal — but didn’t rise to a level of a rebellion or an insurrection.
“And the provision of the 14th Amendment really turns on how … we assess what happened,” Wagner said.
Wagner is right.
Liberals love to throw around the word “insurrection.” But it is hard to believe that protesters wandering around the Capitol were trying to overthrow the government when there was no organized effort to do anything once they got inside, no one was armed, and no actual attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election was undertaken.
Indeed, Trump himself told supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” and when things got out of hand he told them to go home.
The left — and establishment Republicans who are often not much better than the left — are terrified of a second Trump presidency. That is why they want Trump stopped. Not because of a fake “insurrection,” but because he is a danger to their grasp on power.
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