CNN senior legal analyst and New York Magazine columnist Elie Honig slammed Democrats for trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, saying that their attempts were “doomed to fail” from the start and that it will only help Trump moving forward.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the state of Colorado cannot remove Trump from the primary ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Honig said the idea that Trump could be removed was a “wild law-school hypothetical sprung to life” which will now provide Trump “with fuel for his effort to win back the White House.”
“You’ll be forgiven if you expected a different result,” he said. “After all, we’ve endured months of cocksure guarantees from leading constitutional scholars that Colorado’s application of the 14th Amendment against Trump was legally ‘unassailable in every single respect’ — this from a retired judge who assured us not to worry because ‘I’ve been studying this specific question in great detail for the past three years. So, you know, I consider myself, personally, an expert on the question.’ Other thought leaders offered up an ‘amen’ chorus, disparaging any argument that the 14th Amendment might not work as ‘extremely weak’ and ‘just complete nonsense.’ Turns out you can’t bludgeon the Constitution into the ground with hyperbolic, conclusory rhetoric.”
Honig noted that there have been numerous other cases where lawfare activists have tried to prevent Trump from holding office by citing the 14th Amendment and that all of those cases lost.
“The justices differed a bit on how exactly a federal candidate can be disqualified in the future, but the bottom-line vote was a stinging, unequivocal rejection of the state-by-state approach,” he added. “It’s not often we see justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on the same page as justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, but the 14th Amendment challenges were so obviously flawed that they ended up creating a cross-ideological consensus.”
“The Supreme Court has now made clear what was already apparent on the face of the Constitution itself: Without some specific enabling act of Congress, it’s not up to the states,” Honig said. “This shouldn’t have been some sort of mystery. It’s right there in the 14th Amendment’s plain text: ‘The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.’ At any point since the 14th Amendment’s ratification in 1868, Congress could have passed a law saying, in essence, ‘we’ll let the states decide, so long as they use reasonably fair procedures.’ But it’s been 150-plus years now and Congress has done no such thing. Unless and until that changes, the 14th Amendment will remain a dusty, nonfunctional curiosity.”
Honig went on to say that many burned “resources, credibility, and political capital” in the failed effort to remove Trump from the ballot and that “his supporters surely will rally around a failed effort by a bunch of Northeastern, elitist law-professor types to use the courts to deny the American voters a choice and to take out the Republican front-runner.”
