This is from today’s Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s campaign team is preparing for a state-by-state legal battle later this year over untested claims that a Civil War-era clause in the U.S. Constitution bars the former president from appearing on Republican primary ballots because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection…Two nonprofit groups who do not disclose all their donors, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Free Speech for People, have prepared multipronged legal strategies to challenge Trump across the country under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. They have written letters to state election officials calling on them to block Trump from the ballot, while separately preparing voter lawsuits and state election board complaints.Donald Trump’s campaign team is preparing for a state-by-state legal battle later this year over untested claims that a Civil War-era clause in the U.S. Constitution bars the former president from appearing on Republican primary ballots because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection…

This is the relevant part of the US Constitution:

Section 3 — ratified in 1868 to punish Confederate officials after the war — disqualifies any “officer of the United States” from future public office who, after taking an oath to support the U.S. Constitution, has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the country. 

It is hard to draw a conclusion from this but inevitably it will remind voters of what happened on that day in January 2021 when there appeared to have been a determined effort to overturn the election result.

On the face of it given what we know about what happened there would seem to be a case and it is just another huge problem that the former President is going to have to face.

An argument against is that it would be far better for Trump to be rejected by the people in an election rather than by a legal case.

Punters currently rate Trump as a 28% chance to win.

Mike Smithson