The notion that the 14th Amendment can be invoked to prevent former President Donald Trump from being on the ballot is the “most dangerous theory that has emerged in decades,” according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.
Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Turley was referencing the article written by the University of Chicago’s William Baude and the University of St. Thomas’s Michael Stokes Paulsen suggesting the 45th president may be ineligible due to run for the White House again due to efforts to contest the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.
The law professors claim section three of the 14th Amendment "disqualified former President Donald Trump [from office], and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election."
Turley argued the theory is "entirely unsupported by the text and the history of the 14th Amendment."
"This provision was written after the Civil War of an actual rebellion where hundreds of thousands of people died — there was an army on the other side. They had their own foreign policy,” he added.
Ingraham noted that if the 14th Amendment were used against Trump, it could "continue to leapfrog across other potential races."
“That’s right. And the ambiguity within this theory is quite maddening. If Trump had asked people to come back an hour earlier, would that have been not an insurrection? If he had mentioned go there peacefully three more times, would that have made the difference? We need a bright line rule. After all, Rep. Raskin and Democrats tried to stop the certification of Donald Trump in 2016. There were violent riots in Washington, D.C., against his inauguration,” Turley responded.
“They had no grounds for that, there were no grounds in earlier certification fights by Democrats. Does that mean that they were all engaged in some rebellion or insurrection? No it doesn’t," he continued. "We have to have some type of bright line rule that guarantees that the voters can make decisions on these questions — I’m not saying people cannot read this as an insurrection as opposed to a riot. But you have to ask yourself is this what you want replicated for the future? I don’t think it is.”
Previously, Turley has argued in a column for The Hill that the legal theory is “ultimate Hail Mary pass" - one a Trump campaign spokesperson called an "absurd conspiracy theory" that "stretch[es] the law beyond recognition."
The Wall Street Journal editorial board also 'torched' the theory in a column published Monday.
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