A new election litigation frontier is a near certainty as a result of events over the weekend. Like last week’s Hints from the Courts news analysis, this article aims to alert readers to intriguing developments and analyze the Arizona angles.
Since the January 6 insurrection, there has been discussion of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, called the Disqualification Clause. On Saturday morning, The Atlantic released a bombshell article co-authored by retired Judge Michael Luttig and Professor Laurence Tribe, two of the most highly regarded constitutional scholars of our time. One is a conservative, the other a liberal. Citing an upcoming law review article (available in preprint) by two other constitutional scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes, both members of the Federalist Society, the Luttig/Tribe article is entitled:
The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again: The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.
This article is not about the intricacies of their constitutional analysis. Rather, we address the practicality of the process of whether the former President might be kept off of – or, removed from – ballots in the elaborate process of working towards November 2024. We will focus on Arizona while noting that Arizona is only one of the 50 states that will be involved in this.