The U.S. Supreme Court still has yet to indicate whether or not it will get involved in those cases in which anti-Trump groups are attempting to use Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify former President Donald Trump from running for the presidency in 2024.
According to the Washington Examiner, Chief Justice John Roberts just published his annual year-end report, and, in it, Roberts did not make any mention of any of the cases involving Trump.
Still, it is expected that, at some point in 2024, Roberts and his court will weigh in on the 14th Amendment issue.
The question is whether this amendment can actually be used to disqualify Trump in 2024.
Thus far, Trump has been disqualified from 2024 Republican primary ballots in two states: Colorado and Maine.
In Colorado, it was the state's Democratic-majority supreme court that ruled that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies Trump, whereas, in Maine, the state's Democratic secretary of state did so.
Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment essentially prohibits those who took certain government oaths and those who "engaged in insurrection" from seeking political office.
Accordingly, those looking to use the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify Trump argue that Trump took such an oath when he became president and that he "engaged in insurrection" on Jan. 6, 2021.
Legal experts have insisted that trying to use this amendment to disqualify Trump in 2024 is a gross misreading of the U.S. Constitution. For this reason, it is expected that, when the Supreme Court does take the case, it will reject this argument.
Those trying to use the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify Trump know that the effort is likely to fail when it reaches the Supreme Court. For this reason, some Democrats are trying to get some of the court's conservative members to recuse themselves from the case - or any other case that the justices may hear regarding Trump.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is the latest Democrat to argue that Justice Clarence Thomas ought to recuse himself, particularly because his wife - Ginny Thomas - is a conservative activist who was in communication with some members of Trump's administration in and around the 2020 presidential election.
Raskin, during an appearance Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, said, "But anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say, if your wife was involved in the big lie, in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election and had been agitating for that and participating this the events leading up to January 6th, that you shouldn’t be participating."
When asked whether Thomas, thus, ought to recuse himself, Raskin said, "He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself."
This is, indeed, the question because the chances are that Thomas will not recuse himself. Raskin did not elaborate on what Congress could do. One possibility would be impeachment, but it is hard to believe that there would be enough support in the current Congress to impeach Thomas.
