A group of noted Ivy League scholars have presented a surprise petition to the US Supreme Court that backs Colorado and other states in their quest to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot.
Politics :
Four of America’s preeminent historians, academics, and Ivy League scholars — former Harvard president Drew Faust, Professor of American History at Harvard and The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, Yale’s Sterling Professor of History David Blight, and Yale Law School’s John Fabian Witt — have taken their case to the US Supreme Court. According to a filing from the group, they have argued emphatically that Donald Trump does not belong on the 2024 ballot under the terms of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and should be blocked from being allowed to participate in the election.
Interestingly, the 4 Ivy League scholars have so many degrees, awards, honors, and legal knowledge between them that their petition should catch the immediate attention of the high court’s justices.
They began their amicus brief by reminding the justices that they are all “elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and winners of either the Pulitzer or the Bancroft Prize or both.” They then cut directly to the chase and informed the justices that their filing was sent to “assist the Court by establishing the original intent, meaning, and public understanding of the Disqualification Clause,” which bars from the ballot anyone who swears to defend the Constitution and then is found to have “engaged in insurrection.”
The 4 Ivy League scholars announced their full support for the Supreme Court of Colorado in its 4-to-3 decision to ban Trump from their state ballot (the US Supreme Court will hear the Colorado case next month). They backed up their opinion by declaring that the framers of the amendment made it clear that “anything short of the disqualification of insurrectionists” would have risked “surrendering the government to anti-Constitutionalist rebels.”
JUST IN: Former Harvard president Drew Faust joins historians amicus brief at #SCOTUS supporting presidential ballot disqualification of Donald Trump as an insurrectionist. Doc: https://t.co/ps2z3qqcIT
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) January 29, 2024
Although Donald Trump will attempt to convince the US Supreme Court that the constitutional amendment doesn’t apply to him because he was an officer of the government, the scholars have disagreed to the nth degree. They explained that the eligibility clause applies “automatically,” that it applies without question to any US president, and that it binds not only those on the wrong side of the Civil War but also those who participate in “future insurrections.”
Ouch!
Colorado district court judge Sarah Wallace concurred with the interpretation from the 4 Ivy League scholars. She previously ruled that Trump’s disqualification effort does not apply because a US president is not an “officer” of the United States.
Constitutional law professors Joshua Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman (who also filed their own brief with the court) argued that “since the Framing, prominent jurists have maintained that the phrase ‘Officers of the United States’ in the Constitution does not refer to the President.”
Needless to say, the surgical breakdown of the constitutional amendment regarding Trump’s eligibility combined with the names and statures of the authors who presented it could make it very difficult for the US Supreme Court to rule in Trump’s favor.
Stay tuned…
OK WASSUP! discusses Politics:
Ivy League scholars explain Trump’s ineligibility.
I am real curious now to see what the Supreme Court says about Trump on the ballot. If these scholars think he should not be on it how does somebody else think he should?