Legal expert Alan Dershowitz slammed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove GOP frontrunner Donald Trump from the primary ballot, stating, “In the sixty years I’ve been practicing and teaching law, I’ve never seen a decision that is so antidemocratic and so unconstitutional”.
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As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis wrote, “The Court, which is made up entirely of justices appointed by Democratic governors, decided without any evidence that Trump incited an insurrection and is therefore ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment.” It has been an interesting experience for some conservatives like me in the past year to find more than one topic where we are in total agreement with leftist Alan Dershowitz (for instance on Israel and Hamas). Dershowitz is no conservative or MAGA supporter, but he is a leftist who believes in the Constitution, a rare breed nowadays. And, according to him, the Colorado Supreme Court has no power or right to disqualify Trump under the Fourteenth Amendment.
“It is absurd,” Dershowitz said of the court’s decision on Newsmax’s National Report. “The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to substitute for the impeachment provision, carefully drafted by the Framers, is wrong.” The Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 prevents those who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” from holding office.
Alan Dershowitz: “In the sixty years I’ve been practicing and teaching law, I’ve never seen a decision that is so antidemocratic and so unconstitutional. It is absurd.” pic.twitter.com/yKta1133UR
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) December 20, 2023
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As Dershowitz explained, “If you want to impeach a president, if you want to make him not be able to run in the future, there’s a provision that requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. But the idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to circumvent that carefully drawn provision, and simply allow any state to make up grounds denying him the right to be on the ballot, undercuts democracy.”
Dershowitz then quoted from the Constitutional amendment directly. “The Fourteenth Amendment itself is very clear. It says in Section 5, ‘The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.’ The Congress. That’s the United States Congress,” he emphasized. “There’s no provision in the Fourteenth Amendment for any state, or certainly any state court, to interfere with the right to vote by its citizens. So this is a terrible, terrible decision.”
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Of course, the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to allow Congress to prevent Confederate traitors from holding office — though, in the long run, this did not actually occur. Many former Confederates held office after the Civil War thanks to their Democrat cronies, much to the detriment of black Americans’ and white Republicans’ civil rights, both on a state level and a national level. If Confederate officers who openly avowed their goal of defeating the United States during the war were allowed to hold office afterwards, it is preposterous to pretend Donald Trump — who is not an insurrectionist and has not been charged with sedition or insurrection — cannot do so.
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With due process through Congress, the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to prevent men like Nathan Bedford Forrest, a traitor who enforced the Confederate law to kill or enslave black troops and their white officers in a bloody massacre at Fort Pillow, from holding office. It was not meant to allow any court in the country to target political opponents in a partisan persecution.