MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann claimed Thursday that Union soldiers died during the Civil War so that candidates like Donald Trump could be prevented from running for public office.

The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified Trump from the state’s ballot in a 4-3 ruling Tuesday, citing the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. “It is true that this provision of the Constitution is new to lots of people because we’ve never been in a situation where you would have somebody running for office who engaged in insurrection or a rebellion,” Weissman told “Deadline: White House” guest host Alicia Menendez.

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“What’s remarkable to me is that the story isn’t the — really, the unanimous finding in the Colorado case because you had no one dissenting on the issue of did he do it. No one was saying, ‘oh, no, this was insufficient proof,’” Weissman said. “There were lots of procedural issues, and I don’t mean to minimize them, that the dissent raised, but there was a district court finding and there was a majority opinion with no dissents on the fact that the leading contender for the Republican nomination had done what we had a civil war about.”

Trump has led President Joe Biden in polling, being 2.3% ahead of the incumbent in the RealClearPolitics average of general election polls from Dec. 4 to Dec. 18. Hundreds of people stormed the Capitol building during the certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The reason for this amendment was because after the Civil War, people said, if you have engaged in this kind of conduct you cannot be any longer the president, the vice president, or any federal position,” Weissmann told Menendez, whose father, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, is under indictment on corruption charges. “So this is historically really important in terms of what many people died for in this country.”

Harold Hutchison on December 21, 2023