Jeff Clark, former acting assistant attorney general during the Trump administration, said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson, which restores former President Donald Trump’s name on the Colorado ballot, will also protect a future Trump administration from a “whole bunch of Section 3 litigation in 2025.”
Clark said in addition to the unanimous 9-0 decision in the case, five of the Supreme Court justices went on to “decide another set of issues” in regards to states’ enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to regulate federal candidates.
“There are only five justices who went on to decide another set of issues, which is let’s move from talking about state enforcement or attempted enforcement of section three, which now is totally the null set there – it can’t be any state enforcement of section three of the 14th amendment, the so called insurrection clause, on to the question of what about enforcing it federally, whether from federal officials or whether from federal judges,” Clark explained on Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“The five justice majority said basically that you can’t do that either because there’s not a specific federal statute on point that meets the constitutional requirements for Section 5 legislation setting remedies for Section 3 violations,” Clark added.
Leahy, noting how he believes the five justices are “setting the stage for something” with their separate ruling, posed a hypothetical question to Clark, saying, “Let’s say Donald Trump is elected in November 2024, and inaugurated in January of 2025 as the president and then he issues an executive order. Could a lawsuit be brought against him saying he’s an insurrectionist at the federal level and therefore we don’t need to follow that executive order?”
“I’ll give you the more commonsensical bottom line question answer, which is yes,” Clark explained. “That’s exactly what I think the liberals wanted to leave open, and let me give you a closer hypothetical, right? I don’t know, suppose Ted Cruz, the senator, takes a job as the head of EPA. EPA issues a regulation in the second Trump administration and there’s a group that argues, ‘Okay, We think this is a violation of the statute for all of our normal reasons – we think it’s arbitrary precepts, but we also think that Ted Cruz has no authority to issue this because he was one of the January 6th insurrectionists in terms of trying to overturn the election in Congress that day.’ So that kind of litigation would be a true Pandora’s box, and unless a new statute could be passed that would open up Ted Cruz to a lawsuit like that in the Trump administration, the five justice majority slammed the door on that.”
“So they’ve protected the Trump administration from being bogged down in a whole bunch of Section 3 litigation in 2025 and beyond by saying that in order for there to be even federal enforcement of Section 3, a very specific set of legislative hoops using Section 5 of the 14th Amendment have to be jumped through first,” Clark added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
