Trump Only Swore To Protect, Not Support, the Constitution, His Lawyers Will Argue in Colorado Disqualification Case

At the Colorado Supreme Court, oral arguments in the case seeking to disqualify President Trump from running for re-election in 2024 based on the 14th Amendment are scheduled for Wednesday, December 6. The case arose from a lawsuit brought by a group of six Colorado voters who say that Mr. Trump’s actions relating to the January 6 attack on the Capitol bar him from running for president because of the so-called “Disqualification Clause” in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.Section Three of the 14th Amendment disqualifies any person who, after taking an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States,” then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against America from holding elected office or serving as an officer of America unless Congress votes to allow it by a two-thirds vote.At trial at the Second Judicial District Court in Colorado, Judge Sarah Wallace ruled that Mr. Trump “engaged in insurrection” but said that it was not clear that the 14th Amendment disqualification applied to the office of the presidency.Attorneys for both the voters seeking to have Mr. Trump disqualified, and those representing Mr. Trump filed separate appeals, with Mr. Trump’s lawyers seeking to have the ruling that he participated in an insurrection overturned and the voters seeking to have him disqualified.Mr. Trump’s attorneys argued that the ruling contained “multiple grave jurisdictional and legal errors” that they want remedied by a higher court, despite the fact that Mr. Trump was allowed to stay on the ballot.The group representing the voters who brought the case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is hoping that Colorado’s high court will rule that Mr. Trump both engaged in insurrection and is disqualified as a result.“We always knew this case would end up before the Colorado Supreme Court, and have been preparing for that from the beginning,” the group’s president, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement. “We are planning to build on the trial judge’s incredibly important ruling that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection,” Mr. Bookbinder added, “and we are ready to take this case as far as necessary to ensure that Donald Trump is removed from the ballot.”In the appeal, the group seeking to have Mr. Trump disqualified is prepared to argue that Mr. Trump “broke an even more demanding oath” than legislators are required to take and that “Section 3 should and does apply to him.”“By swearing the stronger Article II Presidential oath, Trump necessarily also undertook a duty to ‘support’ the Constitution,” the attorneys wrote in a filing. “By definition, one who ‘defends’ something ‘supports’ it.”The presidential oath of office is dictated by Article II, Section One of the Constitution, which requires the president to swear to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”Attorneys for Mr. Trump are prepared to argue that Mr. Trump never took an oath of office to “support” the Constitution, which is the specific word used in the 14th Amendment. Rather, he took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. Mr. Trump’s lawyers are also hinging their argument on their assertion that the president is not an officer of America, writing in a filing that “The framers excluded the office of President from Section Three purposefully.”“Section Three does not apply, because the presidency is not an office ‘under the United States,’ the president is not an ‘officer of the United States,’ and President Trump did not take an oath ‘to support the Constitution of the United States,’” attorneys for Mr. Trump write.However the court in Colorado rules, the case could be appealed to the Supreme Court. Some legal scholars believe that whether or not Mr. Trump is disqualified is a question only the Supreme Court can rightly resolve.

Trump Only Swore To Protect, Not Support, the Constitution, His Lawyers Will Argue in Colorado Disqualification Case

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