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Timing of Trump and the 14th amendment [1]
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Date: 2023-08-15
This is really more of a question than a comment.
My understanding is that there are basically two paths under which Trump (or anyone really) would be disqualified under the 14th amendment’s “you cant incite an insurrection and still expect us to let you run for office” clause. The first is that a state election official (or local for local elections) would declare that the candidate was ineligible due to having incited an insurrection, at which point the candidate probably sues, and a judge ultimately decides the issue.
The second is basically the reverse — someone sues to the election authority to keep the candidate off the ballot. Both end up with the case in court in all likelihood.
But for Trump there is the added dimension that there are 51 election authorities involved (the 50 states plus DC), and in the primary even more. They are nominally independent at least until the suits make their way up to higher level federal courts.
But my question is — what's the timing of all of this. Can the suit happen before Trump wins the nomination. Can he be sued to keep him off a primary ballot? Will some blue states take it upon themselves to do that — thus depriving him of potential convention delegates, (but then again — all of that is non-binding I think.) but maybe not costing him the nomination.
Ideally for Dems the suits wouldn't take place until Trump had won the nomination. At a minimum, even if he gets kicked off all the ballots next August, you would still get that big “who’s gonna replace Trump on the ballot” fight within the GOP and maybe it happens so late that he cant be replaced on the ballot and whoever is VP is just assumed to be taking his spot if his ticket wins. At some point you would expect the suits to make their way to the Supreme Court, since some states election officials would likely rule in Trumps favor and some not. So who knows.
While the actual mechanisms for declaring Trump ineligible seem relatively simple legally (one way or another a judge in the state in question will have to make the call), the permutations across the many states, with different ballot access timing and such really open the whole thing up to alot of chaos.
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