Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that the idea that former President Donald Trump is not subject to a 14th Amendment ballot disqualification is “just wrong every day of the week.”
Katyal said, “I think it is winnable given Donald Trump’s actions and what the Colorado trial judge found in finding him to be an insurrectionist, I think it’s absolutely defensible what the Colorado Supreme Court did. But it’s defensible predominantly on conservative principle, and in particular the idea of the original intent of the 14th Amendment.”
He continued, “Trump’s arguments are really in his brief all addressed to liberal methodology. They’re not based on the text and strict construction on the Founders’ intent. They’re policy arguments like, ‘Oh, it would be terrible for the court and the nation to have someone removed from the ballot,’ and things like that. So, I really do see, Alicia, this very powerful path, and it’s laid out by these two conservative scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, that basically says, look, this is what the Framers of the 14th Amendment wanted in the 1860s.”
Katyal added, “The last thing they wanted was an insurrectionist. And the idea that, as Trump is saying the president is somehow exempt from the 14th Amendment, the technical legal term for that argument is poppycock. I mean, that is just wrong every day of the week from what the Framers understood at the time of the 14th Amendment.”
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