Alan Zendell, August 19, 2023

With less than fifteen months to go before the 2024 election, we all need to take the process seriously and stop letting Donald Trump dictate the narrative and control the news cycle. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, that’s a dangerous situation for the country. It might help to take a step back to where the daily noise he generates can’t muddy our thoughts. Do that, and our priorities become crystal clear.

Most important is whether Donald Trump is eligible to serve as President again. There’s no doubt that will ultimately be decided by the courts, and given the way Trump approaches legal battles, he will try to stretch this one out until (he thinks) it’s moot. That would be a calamity whose negative impact is impossible to overstate.

We remember the impact FBI Director James Comey had on the 2016 election by announcing he was beginning an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s emails six weeks before the election, despite the fact that he found no evidence of criminal behavior. To have the Supreme Court rule on Trump’s eligibility to serve well into the campaign season would be orders of magnitude worse and make us look like the Italian Parliament of the last century.

Since a Supreme Court ruling on whether Trump’s past behavior disqualifies him from ever serving as president again is inevitable, it’s useful to have an idea of how the process might go. The Constitution grants the power to manage elections to the individual states, and state election officials have a legal responsibility to assess the qualifications of every candidate on their ballot. In a perfect world, that would occur in a nonpartisan, objective manner. In reality, partisan politics is likely to dominate in every state with an overwhelmingly red or blue legislature.

Suppose election officials in any of the states Trump tried to influence (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona) or any other highly motivated blue state decides Trump should not be on their ballot. That would trigger suits and countersuits that would have to travel through the local, appellate, and Supreme Courts of the individual states, federal courts, and ultimately end with Trump appealing to the U. S. Supreme Court, where he believes his three appointed Justices would be “loyal” to the president who put them there.

Let’s make some generous assumptions: one or more of those states rules Trump ineligible to be on the ballot in mid-September, 2023, and with the holiday season looming, the court resolution at each level requires an average of six weeks. At that highly optimistic rate, the earliest an expedited case could reach the Supreme Court is late March, 2024, well after most states have selected their candidates. A more realistic guess is that a final Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t occur until or after the national nominating conventions. A ruling that Trump is ineligible might be the death of the Republican Party and would create unprecedented chaos leading up to the election – exactly what Trump was aiming for.

But that’s not the only problem. If you recall the way Watergate dominated everyone’s attention for months, you get it. As serious as Watergate was, the Courts and the Congress were able to come to agreement on Richard Nixon’s crimes without the pressure of a looming presidential election. The way today’s media behave, Trump-related problems will dominate everything. There will be no time to talk about the real issues facing America, nor will an objective assessment of Biden’s record be possible. Trump’s ability to disrupt normal business has already blinded most Americans to the impact of Biden’s major legislative accomplishments: averting a major recession, getting runaway inflation under control, reducing unemployment to record low levels and providing ongoing confidence to Wall Street and the banking system.

This week, Biden accomplished what no president since World War 2 has, bringing together two nations who have hated each other for more than a century and convincing them to put their differences behind them so the Pacific Alliances Biden forged can stand united against the threat of Chinese expansionism. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida displayed the kind of courage we expect from national leaders – the kind we witnessed as Volodymyr Zelensky rallied Ukraine to hold off a massive invasion by Russia. Both leaders acknowledged that the new alliance is directly the result of “Joe’s” efforts.

Prominent legal scholars with both conservative and liberal backgrounds have recently written that the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone who committed or aided in the commission of a crime leading to insurrection, is disqualified from serving as president. At issue is whether that individual must first have been convicted of a crime, but many highly respected legal minds believe that what is already in the public record is sufficient to disqualify Trump from running again. Their opinions are not unanimous; thus, they will have to be tested in court. They’d better get started as soon as possible.