In the United States, a country forged by precedents, there are precedents even for Donald Trump, whose presidency broke all the molds. To answer the question, recurring these days in Washington, whether he will be able to run for the 2024 elections or even move to the White House for a second time if he wins at the polls and if any of the three accusations he faces prosper, you have to go back more than a century, to the dark case of a candidate named Eugene Debs. He campaigned in 1920 from prison. He aspired to lead the country as a member of the Socialist Party of America while serving time for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 by making speeches critical of the United States’ role in World War I. He only got a million votes. In that appointment, he devastated the republican Warren Harding.
The US Constitution not only does not prevent Trump from running for office, nor does it contemplate the prohibition of being president for a person convicted by federal justice, even if he is already in jail, unless he has ended up behind bars for a very specific crime: insurrection. . It is material for philosophical debate whether the role of the former president in the storming of the Capitol falls within the limits of that definition. In the field of judicial discussion, he is ruled out: he has not been accused of that crime in any of the three accusations he is facing at the moment.
Not, of course, in the first, raised in April by the Manhattan district attorney, the Democrat Alvin Bragg, for the alleged payment of black money by the former president’s lawyers to the porn actress Stormy Daniels, with whom, According to her, Trump had an extramarital affair, which he denies. The electoral crimes of which he is accused in New York are not federal. And neither is he accused of insurrection in the third indictment, known this Tuesday, for his alleged attempts to invalidate, supported by an alleged Democratic fraud, the legitimate results of the November 2020 elections, reinforcing his role as instigator of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This time, a Washington grand jury indicts him for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, witness tampering, and conspiracy against the rights of the citizen.
The insurrection is not among the 37 crimes detailed by special prosecutor Jack Smith, appointed by the Department of Justice, in the document with which he ordered his prosecution in Miami last June for the case of the confidential papers that Trump was taken without permission from the White House to his private residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. They did charge him with 31 charges for violating the Espionage Law, for intentionally withholding national defense information contained in as many documents; three, for keeping and hiding papers from federal investigations; two for falsehood; and the last, for conspiracy to obstruct justice with one of his employees, Walt Nauta. Smith added two additional charges to the account this Thursday: obstruction of justice and intentional withholding of classified information, for his attempts to erase video surveillance footage showing how Nauta moved the boxes around the mansion on orders from the former president.
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The provision of preventing an insurgent from being president is contemplated in the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution. Approved in 1868, it is famous for being the one that granted citizenship to every person “born or naturalized in the United States”, also those who had been enslaved, and for guaranteeing the equality of all citizens before the law. Likewise, it prohibited the person involved in a revolt from holding any civil, military or elected position without the approval of two thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both majorities seem like a utopia in the United States of 2023, a country cleanly split in half.
“That amendment was drafted shortly after the Civil War, and was designed to instruct the Confederate rebels, who rose up against Abraham Lincoln,” New York lawyer Kevin O’Brien explained in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS. Specializing in corruption crimes, O’Brien worked as an assistant federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice in the days of Ronald Reagan.
decorum rules
Historian Russell L. Riley, co-director of the miller center of oral history about presidents from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, agrees that the law does not prevent him from presenting himself to a campaign in which he starts as a favorite for the Republican nomination and in which everything indicates that he will meet again with Joe Biden, who is running for re-election. “But it is mostly because no one could have foreseen a situation like this. Trump is a president whose behavior simply exceeds all the rules of decorum that those in that position are expected to have.”
Political analyst Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor in the Bill Clinton Administration from 1993 to 1997, wrote this week in his influential newsletter that “someone who has tried to overthrow the government of the United States cannot be president.” “There is no need to wait for the outcome of the pending criminal proceedings regarding January 6 to prevent him from running for the White House,” Reich continued. “He is disqualified from serving as an elected official of the United States.”
The truth is that the bipartisan commission that investigated his role in the assault on the Capitol for 18 months wrote a voluminous report after questioning a thousand witnesses and reviewing more than a hundred thousand documents, in which it proposed that he be charged with four crimes , including that of incitement to insurrection (the others were conspiracy to issue false testimony and to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official procedure of Congress, the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory that was in progress that January 6 ). They also unanimously suggested that he be disqualified from holding any public office.
Special counsel Jack Smith has in many ways picked up the gauntlet of those nine congressmen (seven Democrats and two Republicans), but he hasn’t gone so far as to heed the disbarment recommendation. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him last November to allay suspicions that the legal prosecution may actually be masking, as Trump maintains and his supporters believe, a political “witch hunt,” so an effort by Smith to proceed with caution.
This caution is also reflected in the procedural deadlines. The trial for the stormy daniels case It won’t start until March, if there are no delays. That is, two months after the start in Iowa of the primaries. On March 5, the celebration of Super Tuesday is scheduled, a decisive day in which the primaries and channels of 16 states, from Alaska to Virginia, coincide. Judge Aileen Cannon, in charge of directing the work of the Florida grand jury that will try him for his handling of the Mar-a-Lago papers, has set the start of that case for May 20. This is (and, again, if there are no delays): just two months before the Republican convention in which the party will choose its candidate in Milwaukee (Wisconsin).
If Trump is, as it seems, elected, and also wins the elections, to Reich and to those who, like him, think that an American president cannot exercise in the middle of so much judicial mud or from jail (from which, for example, could not review classified material) they have to raise another impeachment (the third he would be subjected to) or push the 25th amendment nuclear button, which allows the Cabinet to remove a president who is unable to perform his duties. That resource would be justified on the evidence that a person in prison cannot take the reins of the main power in the world. There are two other options: that Biden, defeated at the polls, pardoned him so as not to get in the way of the people’s decision or that Trump himself pardoned himself or commuted his sentence.
In this country forged by precedents, to find one for the 25th Amendment you have to go back to the assassination on November 22, 1963, soon to be 60 years old, of John F. Kennedy. Despite the fact that it took two hours for Lyndon B. Johnson to take the oath of office and stop the chaos that was incubating, the truth is that, technically, the Constitution did not provide what to do in the event that a president died, resigned or not. could fulfill the duty of the position. With the approval of Nevada, the thirty-eighth state to do so, the amendment went ahead in 1967.
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