Lawyers who represent the government in federal court face a never-ending supply of 1st and 14th Amendment cases from creative plaintiffs. Most such Constitutional claims don’t stick. They hit a well-oiled wall of federal case law and slid right off.

Applying the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment to bar Trump’s 2024 candidacy presents the opposite scenario. There exists virtually no prior cases to follow. In fact, critics who reject Trump’s disqualification under this clause lean almost entirely on the lack of legal precedent.

Other than Trump, in the history of the United States, a defeated president has never tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. In over 150 years following the 14th Amendment’s adoption, there was never a set of similar facts that could have triggered the insurrectionist clause.

Lack of prior similar cases doesn’t render Section 3 of the 14th Amendment any less potent, or its historical imperative any less compelling. If anything, its application is even more urgent as the same violent insurrectionist forces that tore the nation apart in the Civil War are back at it today.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states plainly that, “No person shall … hold (federal) office… who, having previously taken an oath… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof…”

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It’s true that despite its passage more than 150 years ago, it has never been used to bar a candidate seeking the presidency, but this is a specious legal argument. Anyone professing........

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