I’m not a lawyer (yet) as I haven’t taken the bar exam, but I remember learning this in law school.

I can’t find the original court filing that all these news articles are reporting, but presumably, this is a special kind of suit seeking a “declaratory judgment” - a suit asking the court to prevent a harm before it happens.

Cornell Law School discusses it in a somewhat lengthy read but put “simply”, for standing in this kind of case, the court would want to see:

a concrete controversy (as opposed to a hypothetical one, e.g. you can’t seek a declaratory judgment “in case my neighbor decides to hit me”),

between adverse parties (some random citizen can’t sue you for breaking a promise you made to your grandma),

that is ripe (where enough has already happened that a decision right now wouldn’t require much speculation),

not moot (has to be able to affect the current case, for example, declaratory judgment isn’t appropriate to determine “should he have done that?”), and

the court’s decision is needed to prevent imminent harm (has to be relatively certain that a party would be adversely affected if the court doesn’t prevent it from happening).

Here there could be issues of ripeness: the court might not want to act on the mere possibility that Trump will be found guilty of insurrection etc. Courts don’t like to tell people what they can and can’t do unless a real situation makes it necessary, otherwise the court would risk encroaching on powers that belong to the other branches of government.

That case is also an example of this working. The case in front of the Supreme Court had no standing since is was fake plaintiffs.

ETA: I am still shocked you can be a felon and still run for and be president. That is something new I learned.

Many of our laws are based on people being at bare minimum reasonable. Election laws especially are written so that the electorate can decide.

Should a federal conviction for having marijuana plants prevent someone from running for office? Or should the citizens be able to make that decision when voting?

The problem is that because many of our laws lack specificity some modern assholes are attempting to use those loopholes and trying to politicize absolutely everything. Combined with the fact that many people no longer have the time to properly research things on their own (assuming they even have proper critical thinking education now), a decent segment of the population no longer is getting unbiased or minimally biased factual information from “news” sources due to the repeal of laws requiring that over the decades.

Yep. Basically the 14th is the quickest path to disallowing his run. But he can get multiple life sentences for murdering a million people and still run.

The reason that there isn’t a national law that codified Row v Wade is REPUBLICAN OBSTRUCTION.

The system is set up to make it extremely difficult to pass anything, and the Republican party has enforced mandatory party unity on abortion and gun rights for the last four decades.

The trick is the language of the 14th:

Forbids anyone from holding office who “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.”

What does “shall have engaged” mean? Who decides if they actually engaged or not? This is why we need a court decision, as we had in the other guy who was removed. He was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government, he got removed from office.

Trump and his ilk are going to argue that they were the legitimate rulers, that the rebellion was AGAINST THEM. That’s why we can’t just kick them out without a ruling.