7 September 2023
ST. PAUL As a liberal watchdog group in Colorado begins pushing to have former President Donald Trump removed from the 2024 ballot on grounds that he supported an “insurrection,” Minnesota’s top elections official says his office doesn’t have the authority to make a decision on the issue.
In recent weeks, Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said he has received hundreds of “emails, calls and letters” about a legal argument based on a section of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that Trump is no longer eligible to run due to his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Secretary of State spokesperson Cassondra Knudson said the majority of the contacts were emails asking if Trump could be removed from the ballot. However, Simon on Thursday said his office can’t determine whether it’s legal for the former president to appear on the ballot.
“The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State does not have legal authority to investigate a candidate’s eligibility for office,” Simon said in a news release, noting, however, that Minnesota law allows court challenges to a candidate’s ballot eligibility.
“Our office will continue to honor the outcome of that process, as we have in the past,” Simon’s statement concluded.
Inquiries to Simon’s office come as legal scholars raise questions about Trump’s eligibility and as challenges to Trump’s 2024 candidacy emerge in court. Some legal observers say the matter could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s only around five months until the first ballots could be cast for Trump, as presidential primaries begin in early 2024. Minnesota’s primary is on March 5.
Legal groups and scholars argue the Constitution disqualifies Trump because he provoked a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Under the third section of the 14th Amendment, former elected officeholders who engage in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States are prohibited from holding office again. The language was added to the Constitution after the Civil War and was designed to keep Confederate officials from holding office again.
On Wednesday, the liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit in Colorado seeking to have Trump removed from the ballot on those grounds.
Meanwhile, elections officials in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire are looking into the issue.
In late August, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, fielded hundreds of calls about Trump ballot access from Trump supporters after a conservative talk show host claimed the state was attempting to remove the former president from the ballot, NBC News reported.
Scanlan told NBC he expected challenges but is not taking part in any efforts to remove names from the ballot. In a statement on the issue, Scanlan said his office requested the state attorney general to review the issue.
The 14th Amendment-based legal argument gained more attention in the past month after two conservative law professors highlighted the issue in an article set to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Authors Michael Stokes Paulson, a constitutional law professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and William Baude of the University of Chicago argue the language barring insurrectionists from holding office remains enforceable and is not affected by amnesty legislation passed in the 19th century which removed most of the penalties imposed on former Confederate officials.
“Despite its long slumber, Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is alive and in force. It remains fully legally operative,” the authors write at the conclusion of their 126-page article. “It is constitutionally self-executing that is, its command is automatically effective, directly enacted by the Constitution itself.”
The authors, who are members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, also argue the ban on holding office extends beyond Trump it could apply to anyone else who took part in the rally and storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, or efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
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