Prosecutor Jack Smith indicted Trump under the KKK Act, which incorporates the 14th amendment, section 3, of the Constitution. Trump’s disqualification in Colorado also came under the third section of the amendment, which disqualifies from office anyone who has engaged in insurrection against the United States. Columnist Sidney Blumenthal in an opinion piece in The Guardian, puts that indictment into historical context: the same laws – the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871 were enforced after the Civil War, as Klansmen were prosecuted – and Confederates deemed as traitors were forced from office. It was also used again against Klansmen during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.
During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, as the Ku Klux Klan mobilized to deprive black Americans of their rights, the KKK Act was Congress’s attempt to stamp out the Klan’s domestic terrorism. Amos Akerman, the attorney general under president Ulysses S. Grant successfully prosecuted more than 1,100 cases against members of the Klan, effectively breaking it up. Prosecutions under the federal-conspiracy statutes of the KKK Act resumed in 1964, after three civil rights workers were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the local police in Neshoba County in Mississippi. The justice department brought the case against 18 alleged killers under the KKK Act, but federal judge William Harold Cox, a diehard segregationist, dismissed those charges in a ruling upheld by a circuit court. But in 1965, in United States v Price, the case known as the Mississippi Burning case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the law was applicable, in a decision, written by Justice Abe Fortas.
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