A US supreme court case that could remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is the culmination of several years of work by left-leaning watchdog groups to reinvigorate the 14th amendment and its power.
A Colorado case that found Trump couldn’t run for re-election there was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), though other groups and individuals have filed lawsuits and petitions in many states trying to remove Trump under the 14th amendment’s third clause. The clause says that people who were in office and participated in an insurrection against the US can’t hold office again.
Some of the challenges have gone through the courts, while others have appealed directly to elections officials in charge of placing candidates on the ballot. Colorado was the first ruling to decide against Trump, so it is headed to the supreme court at the former president’s behest. Because of how consequential and rare the issue is, it was expected that the high court would eventually be the arbiter of how the clause applied in the modern era.
Crew, a non-profit that has focused in part on Trump corruption issues since he took office, researched the 14th amendment and found it was “really built for this moment”, said Noah Bookbinder, the organization’s president. The group first brought a test case against a local elected official in New Mexico who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Couy Griffin, then a county commissioner in Otero county, New Mexico, was removed from office for violating the 14th amendment.
“We would have ideally liked to bring a number more of those kinds of cases to really establish more of a track record and some more precedent,” Bookbinder said. “Donald Trump sort of forced our hand because this was the person who had really, really landed this attack on a democracy.”
Crew challenged Trump just in Colorado, which became the first state to rule Trump ineligible, but it isn’t the only group working on 14th amendment cases. Another non-profit has been working on keeping Trump off the ballot for several years.
Free Speech for People, an advocacy non-profit founded in the wake of the Citizens United ruling in 2010, focused on Trump corruption cases soon after the former president took office. It was among the first groups to call for Trump’s impeachment.
In 2021, Free Speech for People wrote letters to secretaries of state around the country alerting them to the 14th amendment and how it would affect Trump if he ran again. In 2022, Free Speech for People challenged several members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, on 14th amendment grounds, though the cases weren’t successful at preventing them from running. Once Trump was officially a candidate, the group filed lawsuits challenging his eligibility in Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Illinois and Massachusetts.
“Back in the middle of 2021, we were kind of a voice in the wilderness,” said Ben Clements, the board chair and senior legal adviser to Free Speech For People. “There wasn’t a lot of support for this view, and that’s obviously changed a lot.”
The concept received a boost from two conservative law professors, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, who wrote a law review article in August 2023 arguing that Trump could not hold office again based on their reading of the constitution.
Aside from the two major groups bringing cases, one man has filed lawsuits in various states without legal representation. John Anthony Castro, a Texas Republican and frequent candidate for various offices who says he is also running for president, has challenged Trump’s eligibility in the most states, with no success. Castro, a tax-return preparer, was recently indicted himself for filing false tax returns.
And individual voters or groups of voters have challenged Trump’s eligibility in their states as well. In Maine, voters brought their challenge to the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who decided Trump should not be placed on the ballot there. Maine’s challenge is on hold pending the outcome of the supreme court case.
Crew and Free Speech for People hope the supreme court gives a thorough ruling on all facets of the case to provide legitimacy for the court’s decision and indicate what should happen next. If Trump is removed from the ballot, challenges could pop up in many more states against the ex-president and others.
“We really think as a legal and factual matter that the courts have to get into the meat of it,” Bookbinder, of Crew, said. “But we also think that that is better for the country for the court to give some clarity on the core issues.”
