Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz slammed the Colorado Supreme Court for their decision to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot as ‘absurd’ during an appearance on Newsmax on Wednesday.
Dershowitz correctly points out that Trump was not charged with or convicted of insurrection and goes on to point out that the BLM riots of 2020 could have been considered an insurrection, as well as the pro-Hamas demonstrations currently happening in cities and on college campuses.
He makes it quite clear that he is not a Trump supporter, but predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule against this.
Transcript via Real Clear Politics:
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: In the 60 years I have been teaching and practicing law, I have never seen a decision that is so anti-democratic and unconstitutional. It is absurd. The idea that the 14th Amendment was supposed to substitute for the impeachment provision carefully drafted by the framers is wrong. If you want to impeach a president, if you want to make him not be able to run in the future, there is a provision that requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate. If 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.
The 14th Amendment itself is very clear. It says in Section V that “Congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article.” The Congress, the U.S. Congress. There is no provision in the 14th Amendment for any state or state court to interfere with the right to vote of their citizens. This is a terrible decision, it will cause disarray. If it were to be affirmed by the Supreme Court, which I doubt it will be, it would cause distress to the electoral process and would result in a repeated 2020 where whatever the result of the election was, particularly if Trump were to lose, he wouldn’t accept the loss, and he would have, in this case, some legal basis for questioning whether or not the courts had any proper role to play in taking him off the ballot in some states…
We don’t even know what an insurrection is! He hasn’t been charged with insurrection, he hasn’t been convicted of insurrection. People will say that Biden was involved in an insurrection in allowing thousands of people to come across the border, or the people who were involved in the Black Lives Matter demonstration, or the people today who are protesting in the streets all over the country against American policy toward Israel. Some of these are socialist revolutionaries. You have to have a definition of what an insurrection is. And the Colorado Supreme Court gets a C-minus.
Watch the video:
Dershowitz may be a Democrat, but he is absolutely right about this.
