A growing number of legal scholars say former President Donald Trump should be banned from returning to the White House due to his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.

Conservative J. Michael Luttig, a retired former federal judge, and liberal Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard Law School professor, wrote in The Atlantic Saturday that they believed the Fourteenth Amendment's disqualification clause applied to Trump now.

They argued that 'conviction would be beside the point,' as the former president has been indicted four times, with two of the cases revolving around his efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 win.

'The former president's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place [Trump] squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again,' Luttig and Tribe wrote in their Atlantic piece.

They pointed to several other legal scholars who had already come to the same conclusion including William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, who wrote on the topic for a forthcoming University of Pennsylvania Law Review edition, as well as Yale School of Management's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain.

Former President Donald Trump appears at the 'Stop the Steal' rally on January 6 ahead of the violent Capitol attack. More and more legal scholars think he would be banned from the presidency over his actions that day, which they say activated the disqualification clause

Liberal constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe (left) and retired former federal judge J. Michael Luttig (right) appeared with CNN's Jim Acosta on the network Saturday to discuss a piece they wrote for The Atlantic on how Trump is already barred from the presidency

Baude and Paulsen are members of the conservative Federalist Society and they wrote that 'the case for disqualification is strong.'

'In our view, on the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack,' Baude and Paulsen wrote.

Baude and Paulsen wrote that Trump delivered a 'general and specific message' when he appeared before a crowd at the 'Stop the Steal' rally on the Ellipse, ahead of the violent Capitol attack.

His message there was that the election was stolen and he called on the crowd to take immediate action to block the transfer of power.

He then went silent for hours as the Capitol assault progressed.

'Trump's deliberate inaction renders his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, because it makes it even less plausible (if it was ever plausible) that the crowd's reaction was all a big mistake or misunderstanding,' Baude and Paulsen wrote.

Luttig and Tribe argued that the disqualification clause - which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War as the South was trying to send former Confederates back to Congress - acts on its own.

The clause reads that those who 'engaged in insurrection or rebellion … or [had] given aid or comfort to the enemies' who were serving in government can't serve again.

The scholars believe that means that Trump didn't need to be convicted by the Senate when he was impeached, for a second time, for inciting an insurrection, for the disqualification clause to apply.

They also argue he doesn't need to be convicted on the current charges related to January 6.

'The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup,' Luttig and Tribe wrote.

Appearing on CNN together Saturday, Tribe talked up how Trump's legal cases didn't matter.

He told CNN's Jim Acosta that 'people have got to get used to the fact that whatever happens in these very important trials of the president, under the Constitution's own language, he's simply not eligible to the president again.

'Stay tuned. This is going to be a saga that lasts between now and the election,' Tribe also said.

By Sunday, their read of the disqualification clause was reverberating through the political universe.

Presidential hopeful former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson brought it up when he appeared on CNN's State of the Union with Kasie Hunt.

He told Hunt that he didn't believe Trump would end up being the GOP nominee.

'But what I want to point out is, I'm not even sure he's qualified to be the next president of the United States,' he said. 'And so you can't be asking us to support somebody that's not perhaps even qualified under our Constitution. And I'm referring to the 14th Amendment, that a number of legal scholars said that he is disqualified because of his actions on January 6.'

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who appeared on State of the Union after Hutchinson, pointed to the former Arkansas governor's comments on the 14th Amendment and shared his concerns.

Cassidy said in the same interview that Trump should drop out of the race due to the classified documents case being 'almost a slam dunk.'

The Louisiana Republican called Hutchinson a 'great guy' and noted that he said 'some legal scholars think that he will be disqualified based on the 14th Amendment.'

'I'm not sure that's true, but I'm not an attorney - which means that the people you see on that stage, one of them, quite likely will be the presidential nominee,' Cassidy said, referencing how Trump plans to skip the first Republican debate, which will be held Wednesday in Milwaukee.