The latest legal attempt to derail the 2024 Trump candidacy that isn’t from Jack Smith’s office has taken a life of its own and is annoying to the nth degree. The most irritating aspect is that it’s being cast as a bipartisan effort because some supposedly conservative legal scholars gave their blessing to this perverted interpretation of the 14th Amendment. We’re talking about Section III specifically, which we’ve extensively delved into on the site, along with the conspicuous lack of evidence to prove that Trump was the ringleader in an insurrection or rebellion on January 6.
There are two new developments that our friends at RedState touched upon earlier. First, eight more states are dealing with lawsuits to keep Trump off their respective ballots next year. Second, the Supreme Court will decide whether this legal interpretation holds water.
On the litigation front, John Anthony Castro, also running for president as a Republican, has threatened the former president with “legal hell.” He’s a tax attorney who has been filing these challenges (via Newsweek):
GOP presidential candidate John Anthony Castro threatened Donald Trump on Monday with "legal hell" in his latest bid to get the former president disqualified from the ballot in several states ahead of the 2024 election.
Castro, a Texas tax attorney who has been sharply critical of the former president over his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol building, posted a photograph showing legal filings for eight states that backed Trump during the 2020 election to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
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The filings showed that he is filing challenges to Trump's candidacy in Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia, Montana, Kansas and Idaho. Of these states, analysts only view North Carolina as being competitive in the 2024 election, but Trump not having access to any of these ballots would complicate his path to winning the Electoral College.
We’re neck-deep in clown town; Castro is reportedly running as a write-in candidate. But his antics supposedly provided the basis for the high court to hear arguments. So, John Castro v. Donald Trump is on the docket, with a final opinion to be rendered “on or before October 9.”
Streiff summarized this case nicely:
Castro's lawsuit is a long shot. The bar he has to cross is to prove he is personally injured by Trump's candidacy. He hopes to clear that hurdle by claiming that his candidacy is damaged by Trump's presence "based on a political competitive injury in the form a diminution of votes."
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The claim is that by contesting the vote count and giving a speech on January 6, Trump committed acts of insurrection or rebellion and, therefore, is not eligible.
This attack hit Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The judge dismissed Greene's case. The Fourth Circuit ruled that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment could disqualify candidates from running for office, but Cawthorne was defeated in his primary, preventing a definitive ruling.
The pressure point in this effort will be state secretaries of state, who have to determine if candidates meet the eligibility requirements to run. In the past, this has been limited to validating age, citizenship, and residency, which are the only Constitutional requirements. The volume of cases challenging Trump's eligibility will factor into their decision. The law journals, like the "conservative case of barring Trump from office," will provide a pseudo-legal rationale.
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There are twenty Democrats who will be under incredible pressure to do this, and I have no idea how many TDS-infected Republican secretaries of state are out there. Sometime after the primaries are complete, but before general election ballots are printed, one or more secretaries of state are going to kick Trump off the ballot.
Greene’s victory in that lawsuit provides a precedent that these sorts of attempts by the political class to subvert the voters lack standing. In Florida, a lawsuit that sought to disqualify Trump was dismissed by an Obama-appointed judge, not over the 14th Amendment concerns, but because the parties lacked standing. They never provided evidence regarding how they were “injured” over January 6.
It will all come to a head in October, where the big top to this looney legal sideshow act will close for good, or whether calamity not seen since January 6 ironically rears its ugly head.