SC Deletes Part Of Constitution To Favor Trump's Eligibility

Two and a half hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court (SC) left no doubt as to the result: Donald Trump can run for president of the United States, Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in an opinion piece for the Sacramento Bee.

The court should never fail to enforce the Constitution because of the political preferences of the justices or for the sake of political expediency.

By ruling in favor of Trump, the court will be effectively saying that no court can ever enforce Section 3, and the provision will be rendered a nullity.

In fact, many of the questions at oral argument suggested that none of the constitutional limits on who can be president should be enforced by the courts. Kavanaugh, in questioning an attorney who was representing Colorado voters, said, “Your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree.”

Roberts said that if Trump was removed from the ballot in Colorado, other states would do this too. “It’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” the chief justice said.

“That’s a pretty daunting consequence.” Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

But that would be true of enforcement of any of the restrictions in the Constitution as to who can be president — the requirement that the president be 35 years old, a natural born citizen, 14 years a resident of the country and not have already served two terms.

Any enforcement of these provisions to disqualify a candidate would “disenfranchise” voters who want to elect that individual. Any challenge would have to be initially brought in a court in one state.

That is what is most troubling about the likely decision in Trump v. Anderson is that the SC is abdicating its judicial role of enforcing the Constitution of the US.

Every provision in the Constitution, including Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, exists to limit what the government and the political process can do.

The court should never fail to enforce the Constitution because of the political preferences of the justices or for the sake of political expediency. But that is exactly what is likely to happen in Trump v. Anderson.s

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