A MoveOn.org petition calling for Congress and states to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential race due to his role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack has amassed over half a million signatures.
The MoveOn petition seeks to hold Trump, currently the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, “accountable for inciting a deadly, white supremacist-led insurrection on January 6, 2021 and attempting to overthrow the government to remain in power.”
“The Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides for the disqualification from office of any person who has ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against’ the United States,” the petition explains. “That includes Donald Trump.”
The petition calls on “election officials in every state [to] respect the Constitution and reject Trump from their ballots,” and for Congress to clarify that he is disqualified “by passing legislation to bar Trump from office under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
As of Wednesday morning, more than 506,000 signatures have been collected in support of the petition.
The petition was started over a year ago. However, an influx of signatures was collected over the past few months, as several states started to respond to demands from residents in their jurisdiction that Trump be removed from their ballots.
Two states so far have declared Trump an insurrectionist who is not qualified to run for office. In Colorado, the state Supreme Court made such a ruling, affirming a lower court’s order that declared that Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, after which the state’s highest court further ordered that he be removed from the ballot. In Maine, the decision was made by the state secretary of state, whose office has the authority to determine if a candidate is qualified to run for office.
Several other states are at various stages of deciding whether Trump is disqualified.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Thursday, February 8, regarding Colorado’s decision to disqualify Trump. Several legal experts have expressed the belief that Trump should be disqualified, but given the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, the likelihood of that outcome is very slim.
In a legal filing defending her state Supreme Court’s actions, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject Trump’s attempts “to limit state electoral authority.”
“Just as Colorado cannot be forced to place on its presidential primary ballot a naturalized citizen, a minor, or someone twice elected to the presidency, it also should not be forced to include a candidate found by its courts to have violated his oath to support the Constitution by engaging in insurrection,” Griswold wrote.
Polling on the issue suggests that most Americans would be accepting of a Supreme Court order affirming Griswold’s arguments.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll from mid-January found that 30 percent of voters would back the Court finding that Trump is disqualified from every ballot in the country, while 26 percent would back the Court deciding that states should determine his ballot eligibility on their own — meaning that a combined 56 percent of voters believe the Court should rule in a way that could disqualify Trump.
Only 39 percent of voters, the poll found, say the Court should rule that the former president isn’t disqualified from any ballot at all.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.