Some Members of Conservative think tank groups , Retired Conservative Judges, and Law professors & Legal Scholars are now starting to support this and it is starting to gain momentum, even in conservative states and areas.
State election officials prepare for efforts to disqualify Trump under 14th Amendment
The push to disqualify Trump under this constitutional clause gained more traction when two members of the conservative Federalist Society, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, recently supported the idea in the pages of the Pennsylvania Law Review. Following the Baude and Paulsen article, retired conservative federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe made the same argument in
The Atlantic.
Now, threats of filings against Trump under this clause are gaining steam in a number of states, including New Hampshire and Arizona and in Michigan, a lawsuit to disqualify Trump was filed on Monday. Secretaries of state say they have started to take steps to prepare for the possibility of administering elections without the current GOP front-runner.
In an interview with ABC News, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said that she and other secretaries of state from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Maine started having conversations over a year ago about preparing for the legal challenges to Trump's candidacy.
"I'm talking every day with colleagues about this, we're all recognizing that our decisions that we make may in some cases be the first but won't be the last and there may be multiple decision points throughout the course of the election cycle," Benson said. "So, I think the public needs to be prepared for this to be an ongoing issue that is it has several resolution points and evolutions points throughout the cycle."
But as conversations grow around the use of the 14th Amendment provision, some legal scholars and election officials are increasingly concerned about the practicality of the emerging lawsuits.
"The most difficult aspects of the litigation that the challenges to Trump's eligibility will generate probably aren't so much substantive as they are procedural," Tribe wrote in an email to ABC News, noting that there is a lack of clarity about who has standing to bring the challenges.
"You can be sure that many secretaries of state, advised by many legal experts from across the ideological spectrum, are now studying the details of the legislative regimes in place in their respective states for dealing with challenges to the eligibility of candidates aspiring to become president," he continued.