The Colorado Supreme Court's decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from next year's presidential ballot "is so anti-democratic," constitutional expert and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Wednesday.
The court's 4-3 decision Tuesday made Trump the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to be deemed ineligible for the White House under a rarely used provision of the U.S. Constitution that bars officials who have engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" from holding office.
Dershowitz, appearing on "National Report,"called the decision "absurd."
"In the 60 years I've been practicing and teaching law, I've never seen a decision that's so anti-democratic and so unconstitutional; it is absurd," Dershowitz told co-hosts Emma Rechenberg and Jon Glasgow. "The idea that the 14th Amendment was supposed to substitute for the impeachment provision, carefully drafted by the framers, is wrong."
The 14th Amendment stipulates the process, which clearly says Congress shall have the power to ensure that a person cannot run for office, Dershowitz continued.
"If you want to impeach a president, if you want to make him not be able to run in the future, there's a provision. It requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate," he said. "But the idea that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to circumvent that carefully drawn provision and simply allow any state to make up grounds for denying him the right to be on the ballot undercuts democracy."
Also, the Harvard University professor emeritus noted, Trump has not been charged or convicted of taking part in an insurrection, a term that has not been defined legally.
The U.S. Supreme Court will rule against the Colorado decision, and with more than just a conservative majority, according to Dershowitz.
"I think this case will be decided not along party lines in the Supreme Court," he said. "I think this is such an extreme stretch of the 14th Amendment that he will get more votes than just the people he appointed to the Supreme Court or even the 5-4 conservative majority. I suspect you'll get the chief justice, and I suspect he'll get some other justices, as well.
"This is an extreme, extreme stretch. If you go and read the text of the provision, it doesn't even apply to president. It says no person shall by a senator, or representative or elector, and then it gives an oath of office, and the oath of office is not the presidential oath of office. It's the senatorial oath of office.
"So even the text of the Constitution doesn't make it applicable to the president. But the amendment itself was designed simply to prevent people who fought in the Civil War from running for certain offices."
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