Democrats reportedly floating 14th Amendment to knock Trump off ballot
Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and Harvard Law professor-emeritus Alan Dershowitz analyze the latest theory on 'Hannity.'
Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote an opinion piece decrying those who wish to bar former President Trump from running in the 2024 election, suggesting that voters, not lawyers, should decide.
Some of Trump’s critics have argued that a rule enshrined in the United States Constitution could bar Trump from being on the ballot in the 2024 election. The legal theory proposes that Trump would be subject to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the Disqualification Clause — which bars individuals who "have engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against America, or aided those engaged in such, from holding office, citing Jan. 6.
Raffensperger famously pushed back against Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Now, almost 3 years later, he responded to this call to use the 14th Amendment by writing an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, titled "I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot," comparing those who call to bar him from the ballot to others who have contested elections, including Trump himself.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks at a press conference at the Georgia State Capitol on November 11, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
After observing that the 14th Amendment was made to prevent Confederate officials from regaining power after losing the Civil War, Raffensperger noted that modern activists are now "urging secretaries of state like me to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot unilaterally." He derided this tactic as merely the "newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box."
"Since 2018, Georgia has seen losing candidates and their lawyers try to sue their way to victory. It doesn’t work," he recalled. "Stacey Abrams’s claims of election mismanagement following the 2018 election were rejected in court, as were Mr. Trump’s after the 2020 election."
He warned that barring Trump from even being an option for voters would not only be an "un-American" act, but would actually harm the reputation of America’s democratic system itself.
A digital presentation of President Donald Trump speaking with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is displayed on a screen as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol conducts its final hearing in the Cannon House Office Building on Monday, Dec. 19, 2022 in Washington, DC. ((Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images))
"For a secretary of state to remove a candidate would only reinforce the grievances of those who see the system as rigged and corrupt. Denying voters the opportunity to choose is fundamentally un-American," he wrote. "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."
After noting that "Georgia has faced the cottage industry of election denialism and shut it down" in the past, Raffensperger declared, "The 2024 election won’t be decided by prosecutors. It won’t be decided by John Eastman. And it won’t be decided by the vice president, whose role is simply to oversee a joint session of Congress in which each state’s electors are counted."
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He went on to underline his main point, "The American people will make their own decisions. Country music singer Luke Bryan, a fellow Georgian, said it best: ‘Most people are good.’ Most of the time they will get it right. Trust the voters."
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Houston Keene and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.