Matt Gaetz enlisting support for resolution claiming Trump didn’t 'engage in insurrection'

31 January 2024

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is currently weighing whether to uphold the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state's Republican primary ballot. One House Republican is attempting to sway that decision with legislation of his own.

According to Politico, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) is drumming up support for a resolution that declares the former president did not "engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." That's language lifted directly from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — also known as the "insurrection clause" — which was used to disqualify Trump in both Colorado and Maine.

The decisions from both Colorado's high court and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows to remove Trump from their respective ballot stems from his role in the January 6 siege of the US Capitol, which both entities referred to as an "insurrection." Those disqualifications cited Trump taking an oath "to support the Constitution of the United States," which they accuse him of violating by egging on his supporters on January 6.

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Because SCOTUS issued a writ of certiorari agreeing to consider the Colorado ruling, a decision could be handed down anytime before June, when SCOTUS' current term ends. And even though the Court has a 6-3 conservative majority — which includes three justices appointed by Trump himself — a ruling in favor of Trump isn't guaranteed.

As University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle wrote last month, the Colorado ruling is rooted in the same type of "judicial conservatism" that Republican-appointed jurists claimed in their confirmation hearings to follow while interpreting the Constitution. Trump-appointed Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are all proponents of "originalism" and "textualism," in which adherents interpret the Constitution with a plain meaning, rather than try to apply it in a more modern way.

"If the purportedly conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court are intellectually honest about their jurisprudential approach to the law, this case should not be hard," Wehle wrote in an essay for the Atlantic.

While Gaetz's anti-disqualification measure may pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, it's unlikely to go further than that. The insurrection clause stipulates that any disqualification of a candidate can be overturned by a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, which is virtually impossible given Republicans' razor-thin House majority and the Democratic-controlled US Senate.

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