Liberal groups and other Trump opponents are working to convince state election officials across the nation that former President Donald Trump’s name should be blocked from the 2024 general election ballot for president if he wins the GOP nomination.
His staunchest opponents say some of the criminal charges against Mr. Trump in four separate prosecutions should disqualify him from appearing on the ballot. The effort is moving ahead while the pre-trial proceedings in the cases threaten to sideline Mr. Trump from the campaign trail as he defends himself in court.
The move to exclude Mr. Trump also has prompted threats that Republicans could retaliate by seeking President Joe Biden’s removal from the ballot over allegations of corruption related to his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals.
“If even one radical Secretary of State or county official attempts to remove Trump from the ballot, the right must be equally prepared to remove Joe Biden from the ballot for selling out America and accepting bribes from foreign oligarchs,” conservative radio host Charlie Kirk said.
States are already considering whether to keep Mr. Trump from appearing on the November 2024 ballot.
New Hampshire’s Republican attorney general said this week he is “carefully reviewing” arguments by a group of anti-Trump Republicans who want Mr. Trump kept off the ballot. They cite Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies someone from holding power in the U.S. government if they have rebelled against the government through an insurrection or aided its enemies.
Mr. Trump, the prohibitive favorite in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, faces dozens of charges in Georgia and at the federal level related to his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In Florida, a tax lawyer filed federal court papers arguing that special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Mr. Trump over his post-election actions, as well as similar charges in Georgia, should prevent him from holding public office.
“President Trump’s efforts both in Washington, as well as in Georgia and perhaps other states, as well as the consequential assault on the U.S. Capitol, put Trump at the center of the disqualification clause, and as a result of which, make him ineligible to ever serve in federal office again,” Lawrence Caplan wrote in a filing with the Southern District of Florida.
Mr. Trump has not been charged directly with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, but opponents say his behavior and rhetoric inspired the attack. The then-president held a rally on Jan. 6 blocks away from the Capitol, where he contested President Biden’s victory and called on supporters to protest the results by marching to the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify the election results.
A group of left-leaning national organizations have sent letters to states urging election officials to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot over his actions following the 2020 election.
Mi Familia Vota and Free Speech for People have held rallies and dropped banners at the offices of various state secretaries, calling on them to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot under the Constitution’s Insurrectionist Qualification Clause.
The left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is also calling on Mr. Trump to be disqualified from the ballot.
They cite a 126-page paper authored by conservative law professors Michael Stokes and William Baude that found, “in our view, on the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack.”
But other legal experts say Mr. Trump cannot be excluded from the ballot.
Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said the effort to bar Mr. Trump or any other candidate from the ballot, is unconstitutional. Mr. von Spakovsky said Congress voted in 1872 and in 1898 to remove the insurrection disqualification language from the 14th Amendment, as it was permitted to do with a two-thirds vote.
“That language was removed by Congress, period. That’s the end of the story,” Mr. von Spakovsky told The Washington Times.
The effort to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot would also be rejected by the courts, he said, because the Supreme Court has ruled against imposing any kind of qualification for office outside of what is required in the Constitution.
“So all of these attempts to get him off the ballot, even if they get some liberal federal judge to initially say yes, when it goes to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will throw that out,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.
Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, said the legal question remains open to debate but that the lawsuit filed in Florida is “weak.”
“The argument that Trump is ineligible under the Fourteenth Amendment can’t be dismissed offhand,” he said. “But this isn’t the lawsuit that will achieve his disqualification. The complaint is weak; there’s even a typo in the name of the town where the lawyer practices.”
In New Hampshire, the state Republican Party plans to fight efforts to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, party chairman Chris Ager told The Washington Times.
“Any attempt to remove or deny the ballot access to one of our Republican candidates is absolutely wrong and misguided and we will fight it as a party up to and including intervening in any kind of lawsuit that might come against one of our candidates,” Mr. Ager said.
John Anthony Castro, a lawyer from Texas who is also seeking the GOP presidential nomination, filed a lawsuit in Merrimack Superior Court this week that seeks to force New Hampshire officials into preventing Mr. Trump from appearing on the ballot. The lawsuit cites Mr. Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6th Capitol riot.
In addition to Mr. Castro’s legal challenge, Bryant “Corky” Messner, a Republican whom Mr. Trump endorsed when he ran for the New Hampshire state legislature in 2020, met with Mr. Scanlan recently to discuss challenging Mr. Trump’s qualifications for the ballot.
In a joint statement, Mr. Scanlan and Attorney General John M. Formella said neither of them “has taken any position regarding the potential applicability of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle.”
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Times.
— Alex Swoyer contributed to this report.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.