Donald Trump, the four-time indicted former president, should be blocked from the 2024 presidential ballots in New York, two Manhattan pols urged the state Board of Elections this week.
In a joint letter sent on Dec. 7, state Senators Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Liz Krueger told board Co-Chairs Peter Kosinski and Doug Kellner that Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol disqualified him from ever being president again under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
An angry mob of Trump supporters, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists raided the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 as Congress convened to certify the 2020 presidential election results — which Joe Biden won and Trump lost. In the weeks leading up to the insurrection, the senators noted, Trump “lit the fire” of the insurrection with a cacophony of baseless election fraud claims rejected by dozens of courts across the country.
Moments before the Capitol attack, Trump parroted many of the phony election theft claims during a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House, and called for the crowd of thousands to march down to the Capitol in protest. The insurrection left five people dead, and hundreds of people eventually arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to prison terms.
Earlier this year, Trump was indicted on federal charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. The former president has charged that the indictment, and three others against him, are politically-motivated, and has publicly stated that if re-elected, he would exact retribution; in a Fox News interview on Dec. 5, he denied accusations that he would be a dictator, “except for day one.“
Hoylman-Sigal and Krueger, both Democrats, believe Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021 violated a clause in the 14th Amendment — ratified in the wake of the Civil War — which bars any candidate who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding federal office — thereby disqualifying him from a place on New York’s ballots in the 2024 Republican primary and general election.
A group of conservative legal scholars have launched similar challenges to Trump’s place on the 2024 ballot in states such as Colorado and Minnesota for the same clause which Hoylman-Sigal and Krueger cited. More than 14,000 people have also signed on to a petition calling for Trump to be blocked from the New York ballots in 2024.
“This clause applies to Donald Trump,” they wrote to Kosinski and Kellner. “New York election law explicitly states that candidates are not eligible to run if they are ‘ineligible to be elected to such office or position; or who, if elected, will not at the time of commencement … meet the constitutional or statutory qualifications thereof.’ Thus, ineligible candidates who have engaged in insurrection in violation of the Constitution are not eligible for candidacy under New York law.”
Despite his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and three other indictments for alleged classified document hoarding, falsifying business records and conspiring to overturn the electoral vote results in Georgia, Trump remains the dominant frontrunner for the Republican Party’s nomination in the 2024 presidential election, according to recent poll results.
Trump, a former New York developer currently on civil trial over alleged financial fraud, lost the Empire State in the 2016 and 2020 elections, as Democrats Hillary Clinton and Biden won New York in landslides both times.
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