By Jenny Deam | SOURCE: COLORADO POLITICS
The extraordinary Colorado election case now headed for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if former President Donald Trump is disqualified from the ballot had its humble beginnings three years ago in the Maryland basement office of a self-proclaimed legal nerd.
It was around New Year’s Day 2021. Constitutional scholar and University of Maryland law school professor Mark Graber was putting the finishing touches on a chapter delving into the then mostly forgotten Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Just the kind of thing Graber, a historian at heart, loved. The rarely used section had been crafted more than 150 years ago to disqualify former Confederate leaders from holding office because they had engaged in an insurrection.
It read: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President or Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any State, who, having previously taken on oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, 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. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”