Democrats and left-wing legal scholars building up a campaign to have former President Donald Trump banished from seeking office through the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause are so eager that they neglected to notice they already failed on the matter years ago, Mark Levin said Wednesday.
Levin, host of "Life, Liberty & Levin," and a former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, said anti-Trump Democrats have been so blinded by their fervor to sideline Trump they can't see they don't have a case.
Appearing to reference retired George H.W. Bush-appointed federal Judge J. Michael Luttig and Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe – who have publicly forwarded the theory in the media – Levin said there are certain judges, professors and Democratic officeholders who cannot make a cogent case.
"You've [also] got these Democrats who I thought they hated the Constitution because it was ‘written by White supremacists’ and so forth and so on. But then they cite the Constitution," Levin said on "Hannity."
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He challenged all parties to find the term "president" in the 14th Amendment's Section III, which contains the insurrection clause and governs who can be barred from seeking public office again.
"I'll give you $10,000 – it's not in there," he said, adding that the clause in the amendment – ratified in 1868 chiefly to provide freed slaves citizenship – was meant for former Confederate officeholders and military officers.
"Do you think a Congress after the Civil War believed in states' rights where they actually thought one state, or a handful of states, whether they're legislators or a secretary of state or an attorney general, that state would have the power to deny a presidential candidate a ballot position?" Levin said.
"We still had military occupation in several of these states."
Levin called Democrats who have forwarded the theory against Trump hypocrites, labeling them "phony originalists" who steadfastly believe in the proverbial "living Constitution" theory until it no longer benefits them.
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Levin said "insurrection" in the amendment clearly meant Civil War and anyone who gave "aid and comfort" to the rebel government in Richmond, Va. or Lee's Army.
"They were the ones who were banned from holding public office. They didn't mean for this to apply after the last Confederate died. There's no evidence that they did," he said.
Levin went on to add that on the merits alone, Democrats have a weak case, pointing out how Trump reportedly offered up 10,000 District of Columbia national guardsmen a few days prior to the January 6 riot. Levin said Trump was instead rebuffed by Democrats themselves – in the form of Mayor Muriel Bowser and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
"Can you imagine bringing that charge against Trump? I would love that case. I go in court and I'd say to the jury, 'let me get this straight. He's the only one who offered 10,000 men armed in military equipment and gear to surround that building to protect them on January 6th. He was turned down by the Democrats'," Levin said.
"That's a hell of a way to run an insurrection, don't you think?" he quipped.
However, Levin said the truest reason Democrats have no case for invoking the insurrection clause is that they, via the congressional impeachment proceedings that followed the riot, acquitted Trump of such allegations.
Former Clinton-Lewinsky scandal prosecutor Sol Wisenberg previously told Fox News that the clause is not "self-executing" but would require congressional action. Wisenberg had cited proclamations by the late Supreme Court Justice Salmon Chase, who was a federal jurist at the time of the amendment's ratification.
"There is a way to remove a president: You impeach him, you have to convict him in the Senate. They tried this. The second impeachment was about January 6th, and they impeached him," Levin told "Hannity."
"So if anything, under our constitutional system, Donald Trump was adjudicated ‘not guilty’ of an insurrection and sedition by the one body that took it up: the United States Senate."
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