The 14th Amendment to the Constitution bans anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the U.S. from holding office.

A Florida lawyer is suing Donald Trump in an attempt to disqualify his current run for president. Lawrence A. Caplan’s Thursday lawsuit claims that the ex-president’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot would make him ineligible to run again, thanks to the Constitution’s 14th Amendment—a Civil War-era addition aimed at preventing those who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the U.S. from holding office. “Now given that the facts seem to be crystal clear that Trump was involved to some extent in the insurrection that took place on January 6th, the sole remaining question is whether American jurists who swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution upon their entry to the bench, will choose to follow the letter of the Constitution in this case,” the lawsuit says, also citing Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Legal experts say it’s an uphill battle to argue in court, since the amendment has hardly been exercised in modern history. “Realistically, it’s not a Hail Mary, but it’s just tossing the ball up and hoping it lands in the right place,” Charles Zelden, a professor of history and legal studies at Nova Southeastern University, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

archive link to South Florida Sun Sentinel article: https://archive.ph/1BntD

  • El Barto
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    1541 year ago

    Anyone who says that the election was rigged, and insists on it after being proven false over and over again, well… if that doesn’t prove malice, then I don’t know what will.

      • @iBaz
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        541 year ago

        The election was the most secure in our country’s history, that is a fact, but Trump planted seeds of election interference in 2016, when he won, so there was no denying what his strategy would be in 2020 (and he started on it early in 2020). There were definitely people that voted fraudulently, but it seems the majority of them, that I have seen reported on, were Republicans (voting for dead family members,voting twice, etc).

        • Baron Von J
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          441 year ago

          There were definitely people that voted fraudulently, but it seems the majority of them, that I have seen reported on, were Republicans (voting for dead family members,voting twice, etc).

          Trump actually told people in North Carolina to vote twice.

        • @rambaroo
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          1 year ago

          What does your first thought about the “most secure election” even mean, and how do you prove it?

          • @ASprigOfSage
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            131 year ago

            Not iBaz, but it’s the fact that every state that trumps legal team tried to sue had to double, triple, or further check the ballots has made it the “most secure election ever”. Basically the recounts that happened in Florida with Gore v Bush happend multiple times when trump attempted to dispute the election.

      • @4lan
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        181 year ago

        Weren’t most cases of election fraud in 2020’s election committed by Republicans?

        Our governor’s son tried to vote for him even though he was 17. He was turned away and then came back later that day and tried to vote again…

        It’s always projection

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        Anecdotal data is wholly irrelevant when you have laws upholding the results and should have no bearing on convincing you of one or another thing.

        Yes, we know that every election has some fraud. A lot of it is unintentional and a lot of it has been perpetrated by republican voters.
        There were fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud found in the 2020 election. https://fortune.com/2021/12/14/trump-voter-fraud-investigation-biden-battleground-states-only-475-potential-voter-fraud-cases/
        https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/21/politics/fact-check-republicans-voter-fraud-kirk-hartle/index.html
        The ultra-conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has recorded just 1.438 proven instances of voter fraud going back to the 1990s.
        https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

        There has been an attack on our country by a sitting president to destabilize the people’s trust in the principle element of democracy. It has worked extremely effectively as nearly everyone will now question how valid an election really is - the kernel of doubt has been sown. Yet there was zero Z.E.R.O. reason to question the results of the 2020 election.

        Trump and his allies had claimed there was voter fraud because the polls prior to the election indicated he was in the lead while the results of the election contradicted the polls. There was also the previously known and reported and anticipated timing of events where mail in ballots were counted in bulk at odd times. Everyone knew the votes would be counted in chunks and that one candidate would quickly pull ahead of the other. We even knew that a lot of republicans weren’t going to vote because it was already anticipated (for no reason) that the election would be rigged. As entirely fictional reports of voter fraud made their way through the zeitgeist, they grabbed onto these stories and presented them as fact with zero evidence to back them up (looking at you pillow guy). The cases were thrown out of court because the lawyers had absolutely no evidence to present to the judges.

        Anecdotal stories are irrelevant when the sitting president of the United States is known to have fucked this country over. He’s an evil narcissist and anyone who believes him to be anything else is a fool participating in his intentional dismantling of our democracy for his personal gain and pleasure.

        You shouldn’t be “thinking” there wasn’t enough fraud to sway the election. You should know this to be 100% factually true just as you know it to be 100% factually true that the moon is a sphere. What’s on or inside the moon is certainly up for debate ;-)

              • @dragonflyteaparty
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                31 year ago

                These things don’t really seem to be equivalent. The idea in the 2020 election is that there were illegal votes cast and votes illegally purged and that allowed Biden to win. The idea in the 2016 election is more on misinformation on part of Russia and other sources. One is aledging illegal votes while the other is aledging misinformation. Those are pretty different things. And your first link is just about a few Democrats who are concerned about the security of voting machines and want to strengthen said security.

      • @RagingRobot
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        41 year ago

        Yeah people weren’t voting for Biden they were voting against trump. Biden is lame. I’m a democratic lol. I wish we both had better choices.

    • @NABDad
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      31 year ago

      He could just argue that he’s such an idiot he thought it was true despite the evidence.

      …except for statements about Pence being too honest which kind of show he knows he was trying to seize power illegally.

      • El Barto
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        21 year ago

        To reach that kind of level of Idiocy would be unthinkable, knowing that you have the power of a U.S. president.

        • @NABDad
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          11 year ago

          It would have been before. Now, I’m not entirely sure.

          • El Barto
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            11 year ago

            My point is that it’s not idiocy. To be idiocy, it has to be extreme idiocy, and this is isn’t it.

            This guy is not surrounded by noobs. I’m sure he asked the right people whether the elections were legitimate, and he didn’t like the answer. Or he was just following a soviet-era book of rules handed over to him by who knows who. In either case, it’s not idiocy. It’s malice.

    • @[email protected]
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      -101 year ago

      Malice isn’t what needs to be proven. I’ll get voted down for saying this but it’s far from proven that trump “engaged in insurrection”.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 year ago

        He just did everything he could to encourage it and then watched on TV for over an hour giddy that it was happening, refusing to make a statement to call them off, when everyone he knew was begging him to. Yep totally innocent.

        • @[email protected]
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          01 year ago

          Stop it. I’m not defending Trump.

          How do you think the legal system works? The prosecutor just says “c’mon your honor he totally did it” and the judge and jury just say “yep, totally”?

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            I think the legal system works exactly that way for poor/black people but for white people you buy your way out of jail.

            Probably because that’s been demonstrated a seemingly infinite number of times

            And yeah what you wrote was a textbook defense, no only in the legal sense but in an everyday sense too.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        The term you are looking for is mens rea and from what we already know from the January 6th committee, Jack Smith has Trump dead to rights in that respect.

        He also almost certainly has additional evidence that the committee didn’t get and that we don’t know about yet.

        It’s not looking good for Trump which is exactly why he’s desperate to delay the trial until after the election in hopes that he wins and can make it all go away.

        I’m surprised I even have to say this as I thought it was common knowledge regardless of one’s political persuasion.

        Also, I didn’t downvote your comment.