RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest move in the campaign to disqualify President Trump from holding public office — and block him from running for president in 2024 — features an outrageous demarche from Free Speech for People. That’s the group that, as our A.R. Hoffman has been reporting, is working to use the 14th Amendment’s “disqualification clause” as a sword to cut down Republican candidates from Georgia to Arizona.

It turns out, as Mr. Hoffman reports in his latest scoop, that Free Speech for People is sending to all 50 secretaries of state a request to sign a declaration that what happened on January 6, 2021, was an insurrection under “all conceivably applicable definitions of the word,” and that Mr. Trump “engaged” with that uprising in “both words and actions.” Then they want the secretaries to sign a declaration.

It would state that because of the events of January 6, “consequently” Mr. Trump “is disqualified from holding ‘any office’ under the United States — including the presidency. As a result, he is ineligible to appear on the presidential primary ballot.” They even have typed up a signature line for each secretary of state. It leaves a blank on which each can write the state of which he or she is secretary.

Not since Mr. Trump himself got on the blower with the secretary of state of Georgia and asked him to “find” some 11,780 votes have we seen anything so baldly inappropriate. Mr. Trump has already been tried — in his second impeachment — for inciting an insurrection against the United States. The jury, meaning the Senate, duly did its job and concluded that the president was, as the Senate itself put it, “not guilty.”

Much of the case of Free Speech for People appears lifted from the work of the January 6 committee, timed to pick up the prosecutorial baton when that body wraps next week. Yet not even that tribunal — which has heard no opposition testimony, has allowed no cross examination, and has shared with the accused no evidence — has formally taken any action, not even referring Mr. Trump to the Justice Department.

The statement that Free Speech for People wants the secretaries of state to sign is written in florid tones, noting that the January 6 rioters “achieved a feat not even the Confederate rebellion managed: seizing the United States Capitol and disrupting the peaceful transfer of power.” Free Speech for People throws in a whiff of treason, writing: “To be sure, Trump did not himself attack the Capitol, or fire a gun. But neither did Jefferson Davis.”

Wisdom often adheres in the art of making distinctions, rather than a conspiracy of conflation. Here we have an organized effort to suborn 50 secretaries of state to pledge to work to exclude someone from the ballot in advance of any announcement of candidacy and in the absence of any complaint to that person running. This smacks, in our opinion, of tampering with a government function.

We don’t mind saying that from the start we have been concerned that this is where the push to disqualify Representatives Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others would end. We opposed those efforts since they were first launched. At least, however, those suits were brought before judges, and had to conform to the strictures of due process. This action is a plea for unilateralism — a bid to disqualify first and ask questions later.

It’s not our intention here to suggest that Mr. Trump is innocent of wrong-doing. What we are seeking to defend here is due process, separated powers, and our basic constitutional principles. We would like to think that the worthy secretaries being asked to sign this instrument will stand up for these values. It’s hard to think that the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment had any intention of it being invoked in this way.