Trump is already 'ineligible to serve as president ever again': top legal scholars

According to a renowned Harvard law professor and a distinguished retired conservative judge, regardless of how Donald Trump's Washington D.C. trial plays out over an alleged plot to overturn the voters' will in the 2020 presidential election, he is already ineligible to hold office again based upon provisions contained within the U.S. Constitution.

In a comprehensive column for The Atlantic, Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School, and retired conservative Judge Michael Luttig who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, maintained that the former president has already disqualified himself based upon his actions with regard to the Jan. 6 insurrection and a guilty verdict in Judge Tanya Chutkan's courtroom isn't even needed to put congressional action in motion.

According to the two legal scholars, based upon their research of the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, Trump's Jan. 6 complicity and election interference plots should bar him from office -- but Congress and the country need the will to enforce it.

Writing that the "often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government ...any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies," the two legal experts made the case that former president went well beyond that.

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"Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point," they wrote. "The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation."

Adding that Trump's actions "place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause," they explained, "The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause."

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Pointing out they are looking forward to a "richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal" by William Baude and Michaels Stokes, both members of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, will bolster their case, Luttig and Tribe added that fact will make it "more difficult for them to be dismissed as political partisans."

"The process that will play out over the coming year could give rise to momentary social unrest and even violence. But so could the failure to engage in this constitutionally mandated process. For our part, we would pray for neither unrest nor violence from the American people during a process of faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution," they wrote before concluding, "The men who framed and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment entrusted to us, 'the People of the United States,' the means to vigilantly protect against those who would make a mockery of American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law—and of America itself. It fell to the generations that followed to enforce our hallowed Constitution and ensure that our Union endures. Today, that responsibility falls to us."

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