Florida judge rejects 14th Amendment challenge to Trump candidacy

A lawsuit brought in a Fort Lauderdale court to pose a 14th Amendment challenge to President Donald Trump's run for a second term in office was dismissed on Thursday by Judge Robin Rosenberg. The Obama-appointed judge determined that the plaintiff in the case had no standing to bring it.

"Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge Defendant's qualifications for seeking the Presidency," she said, going on to say that "the injuries alleged" by the plaintiffs stemming from the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, "are no cognizable and not particular to them," The Palm Beach Post reported.

Rosenberg continued in the ruling that "an individual citizen does not have standing to challenge whether another individual is qualified to hold public office."

The lawsuit was filed last week and was quickly dismissed by Rosenberg. While she did not determine whether or not the 14th Amendment could be used in the case, she did say that Boyton Beach attorney Lawrence Caplan, along with two others, had no business bringing the challenge. 

Caplan previously claimed that "The 14th Amendment is very clear that you do not need a conviction. You need to be accused and obviously there has to be a rationale for the accusation. I read the amendment," he said, "and I read the facts of the indictment, and they match very closely."

The 14th Amendment was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to prevent confederates from seeking federal office. The section at issue reads "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an 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."

In the United States v Donald Trump case, in which Trump was indicted by Biden's Department of Justice, he was not charged with insurrection. After the indictment, a plethora of articles emerged in The Atlantic, New York Times, and other outlets positing that Trump should be stricken from the ballots over allegedly causing an insurrection, under the 14th Amendment.

New Hampshire's Department of Justice issued a statement about their state's consideration of this method to deprive their voters of the ability to elect Trump, saying that:

"Neither the Secretary of State's Office nor the Attorney General's Office has taken any position regarding the potential applicability of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle."