Thought Experiments

Let’s pretend that a 27-year-old American male, TikTok Influencer, with a following of tens of millions of Americans, who is also a defendant in a case charging seditions conspiracy during the Jan 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, announces that he is running for President. He is being held in jail pending his trial because his previous behaviors strongly suggest that he is a flight risk. Is the judge required to let him out on bail with an ankle monitor just because he is running for President? I would say, “No,” simply because his age disqualifies him from holding the office of President of the United States. His announced Presidential campaign is a sham.

In another scenario, we have a foreign-born actor with worldwide recognition – someone of the stature of Jean Reno or perhaps Pedro Pascal – who is in jail for participating in the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection. Like Father Guido Sarducci before him, this actor declared his campaign for President before he was jailed. Does the judge have to release him so that he can run his campaign? Again, the answer is, “No,” but this time because in order to run for President, one must be a natural-born citizen of the United States. Our actor is not.

The bottom line is that unless a potential candidate actually meets the constitutional requirements to run for the office, (s)he is ineligible to hold the office and thus their campaign run is irrelevant. And this brings me to Republican Presidential candidate and frontrunner, Donald John Trump.

Since Trump clearly abetted and gave comfort to an insurrection against the United States and participated in a plot to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election, he has incurred a disability, under the provisions of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prevents him from being President. Any of the judges in the four jurisdictions that have indicted him should be able to throw his sorry ass in jail for good reason and declare that, under the constitution, he is ineligible to hold the office of President unless two-thirds of both houses vote to remove that disability. If they do not, his ass stays in jail until his trial is completed.

Actual constitutional scholars have said that this kind of declaration is one to be made by a Secretary of State holding Trump ineligible to run – something that would probably wend its way to the SCOTUS although possibly too late to keep him from office. I would think that putting him in prison during the campaign (on the basis of ineligibility to hold office) would be a quicker way to achieve the same goal.

I’m not a lawyer; so, convince me otherwise.