This week, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear a petition from an unknown Republican presidential contender seeking to bar former President Trump from the 2024 race.
There are more efforts across the country to remove Trump from the forthcoming presidential election. This is because critics say the leading Republican candidate is constitutionally unfit to be commander-in-chief because he allegedly “participated in an insurrection” against the country’s government on January 6, 2021.
One person who tried to do this was John Anthony Castro, a tax consultant from Texas who was running for the GOP’s nomination for president. He used a section of the 14th Amendment from after the Civil War to sue Trump in several states to get him out of the race. That part of the law says that any U.S. official who swore to protect the Constitution can never hold office again if they “participated in insurrection or rebellion” or “gave aid or comfort” to people who were trying to overthrow the government.
“The creators of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment intentionally created it to keep pro-insurrectionists who are very popular from being able to vote,” Castro told the judges in court documents. “Therefore, Castro is not just in the ‘zone’ of interests; Castro is exactly the kind of person that the people who wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment wanted to protect politically, while Trump is exactly the kind of person they wanted to keep out.”
But Castro’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that he didn’t have the constitutional right to sue Trump for his claimed role in the U.S. Capitol breach was turned down by the country’s top court.
No one spoke or voted on the case, and the judges turned it down on Oct. 2, the first day of their new nine-month term.
Trump hasn’t said anything about Castro’s case in public.
Castro’s plea is one of many from left-wing political groups that are trying to use the 14th Amendment to keep Trump from running for office in their states. But some people warn against using the clause against the past president, even though politicians, activists, and people who don’t like Trump are against it.
Alan Dershowitz, a former professor at Harvard Law School, said that the idea places the Constitution in “grave danger.”
On August, Dershowitz stated to Just the News, “It would take away the power of the people to choose the President and give it to local Secretaries of State as well as Democratic governors.”
8 Comments