'Can’t bludgeon the Constitution': Experts blasted for misleading voters on 14th Amendment

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump cannot be excluded from the Colorado state ballot, the "brief national dalliance with the 14th Amendment is now officially over," according to legal analyst Elie Honig

In an op-ed published Monday, Honig went on to say, "It was plain from the start that the effort to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot was doomed to fail."

Honig contends that the push to use the 14th Amendment to exclude Trump from the ballot only served to boost his campaign to take back the White House. He also accused the American media of giving the public false hope that the court would come to a different conclusion.

"You’ll be forgiven if you expected a different result," he wrote. "After all, we’ve endured months of cocksure guarantees from leading constitutional scholars that Colorado’s application of the Fourteenth 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 Fourteenth 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."

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Honig, a senior legal analyst for CNN, wrote for New York Magazine that the numerous court challenges from 14th Amendment advocates were almost as unsuccessful as Trump's own record of election challenges, and the SCOTUS ruling on Monday was no outlier, since dozens of Fourteenth Amendment challenges to Trump has already been rejected in state and federal courts across the country.

"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 Fourteenth Amendment challenges were so obviously flawed that they ended up creating a cross-ideological consensus," Honig wrote.

Now that the push to remove Trump from the Colorado ballot has failed, Trump and 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 frontrunner."

Read the full op-ed over at New York Magazine.