President Trump is suing the state of Michigan to ensure he can appear on the ballot next year as a separate lawsuit in the state moves to disqualify Mr. Trump under Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which bars from office those who “engaged in insurrection” against America.

On Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a suit seeking to bar, via an injunction, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson from constitutionally disqualifying Mr. Trump. Ms. Benson is the official who would be in charge of keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot, although any decision would likely face a court challenge

“Despite President Trump’s tremendous popularity, there are people who want to deny Michigan voters the opportunity to express their choice by voting for him,” the suit contends. “To accomplish this, they want the Secretary of State to violate her duties and exercise powers she does not have to keep President Trump’s name off of the ballot.”

Mr. Trump is arguing that the Michigan Court of Claims — a civil court —  should rule that Ms. Benson has “no authority to refuse to place President Trump’s name on the ballot and enter an injunction stopping her from doing so.”

In Michigan, a separate suit filed in late September by a liberal group representing voters who think Mr. Trump is disqualified from running for office, Free Speech for People, claimed that Mr. Trump is disqualified under Section Three, a clause that became the law of the land in the years after the Civil War to block from office those who had served the Confederacy. 

Efforts to disqualify Mr. Trump from office are not limited to the Wolverine State. Lawsuits in Colorado and Minnesota are also seeking to disqualify Mr. Trump as an insurrectionist, though no federal court or law has found that an insurrection occurred.

Mr. Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment of the charge of “incitement to insurrection,” and no one involved in the breach of the Capitol has been criminally charged as an insurrectionist.   

Attorneys for Mr. Trump in Michigan maintain that the events of January 6 “were not an ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment” and that Mr. Trump’s actions that day do not qualify as “engagement” in those events.

Only one official, a county commissioner in New Mexico, has been judicially barred from office on account of January 6. Mr. Trump’s case could eventually reach the Supreme Court on appeal in the months leading up to the 2024 election.