COLORADO SUPREME COURT DISQUALIFIES TRUMP FROM STATE’S 2024 ELECTION BALLOT OVER U.S. CAPITOL ATTACK (Trump Disqualification thread) Edit MAINE TOO

[Family Lives Matter]

Asking here without creating another thread. Does anyone else see the potential dangers of this in future elections? States having the ability to remove candidates off of ballots. I can see this quickly getting abused.

The danger of people.who tried to overthrow the government not being able to run as president?


Do you not see the stupidity in that logic?

 

[3rdWorld]

The danger of people.who tried to overthrow the government not being able to run as president?


Do you not see the stupidity in that logic?

They're so desperate to have a Hitler in charge they don't care what the implications are..

 

[Ghost Utmost]

It's happening

 

[FreedMind]

Ppl really want to reelect this dude.

 

[Yapdatfool]

Asking here without creating another thread. Does anyone else see the potential dangers of this in future elections? States having the ability to remove candidates off of ballots. I can see this quickly getting abused.

You think all the red states are gonna get all non republican candidates disqualified now?

Or remove Biden and have Trump only?

 

[TripleAgent]

Ppl really want to reelect this dude.

NUCLEAR fukkERY

 

[Kyle C. Barker]

Don't worry. There won't be any future elections. Trump will end democracy because you didn't vote for Biden hard enough.

What a disingenuous ass post.

Trump literally tried to do that with the fake electors and January 6th.

 

[bnew]

He has no chance in Maine even if he’s on the ballot. He’s down 0 projected electoral votes and ya boy newsom said he’s against this. So my joke about cali removing him next can’t even happen. So what’s next, NY will remove him? Maine hasn’t voted red since the Berlin Wall fell

trump picked up 1 electoral vote from Maine in 2020 and now he won't even get that.

 

[Kyle C. Barker]

I'm saying beyond Trump. Come sense decisions don't seem so common anymore.

There is already precedence for this.

You'd be the one reversing precedence by letting this slide.

You're basically green lighting a January 6th every 4 years.

 

[3rdWorld]

Ppl really want to reelect this dude.

His response is very revealing, from a psychological point of view.
It's not even funny but quite disturbing.

 

[Wild self]

There is already precedence for this.

You'd be the one reversing precedence by letting this slide.

You're basically green lighting a January 6th every 4 years.

Some c00ns just dont want racist CACs to face accountability in law

 

[bnew]

US Supreme Court officially asked to take up Trump's 14th Amendment issue

Colorado's high court ruled Trump was disqualified from the ballot earlier this month.

www.politico.com

US Supreme Court officially asked to take up Trump’s 14th Amendment issue​

Colorado’s high court ruled Trump was disqualified from the ballot earlier this month.

The Colorado GOP has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate former President Donald Trump on the state's primary ballot, dragging the high court into the fight over the 14th Amendment. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

By ZACH MONTELLARO

12/28/2023 10:42 AM EST

Updated: 12/28/2023 02:24 PM EST

The Colorado Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to reinstate Donald Trump on the primary ballot — officially dragging the nation’s top court into the fight over whether the former president can be legally barred from office.

The state Republican committee asked the court late Wednesday to overturn the ruling issued by the Colorado Supreme Court earlier this month, when it struck Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot. The court ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, disqualifying him from the presidency under an interpretation of the 14th Amendment — but paused its ruling until the Supreme Court could weigh in.

The state GOP’s petition argues three points: The office of the presidency is not covered by the 14th Amendment, the insurrection clause is not “self-executing” — meaning Congress alone must enforce it, and states cannot make that determination on their own — and that by kicking Trump off the primary ballot, the state Republican Party’s First Amendment rights of association have been violated.

The party is represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative Christian law group. Jay Sekulow, who defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, is the organization’s chief counsel.

The Colorado court’s decision earlier this month to bar Trump from the ballot was a landmark one, supercharging the legal efforts to have Trump barred from office, which has been pushed by a strange bedfellows group of liberal activists and conservative judicial scholars.

Their argument rests on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was passed following the Civil War to stop former Confederates from holding office. The amendment reads that those “having previously taken an oath” to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. cannot hold public office.

Trump’s legal team has maintained he did not engage in the insurrection in the first place. But they’ve also added that, because of the wording of the amendment, it does not apply to the office of the presidency.

So far, Colorado’s top court is the only one in the country to find Trump ineligible to run. Other state Supreme Courts — like Minnesota in November and Michigan on Wednesday — have effectively punted on the issue, allowing Trump to appear on states’ primary ballots while leaving the door open for further challenges for his general election eligibility.

The justices in the majority in the 4-3 ruling in Colorado noted that they were treading on unfamiliar territory at the time, but ultimately found Trump was culpable for the violence at the U.S. Capitol more than two years ago.

“President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it,” the majority wrote. “These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.”

The U.S. Supreme Court does not have any set timeline for when — or if — they must take up the case. But many legal experts have urged the court to weigh in expediently, as to resolve the issue as far in advance of the 2024 election as possible.

The Colorado court also noted that it anticipated the U.S. Supreme Court would eventually take up the issue. “We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory, and that this case presents several issues of first impression,” the majority wrote.

The state Supreme Court said an appeal would automatically continue its pause, and election officials there “will continue to be required to include President Trump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, until the receipt of any order or mandate from the Supreme Court.”

The Colorado GOP’s appeal this week means Trump will almost assuredly appear on the primary ballot in the state, unless the U.S. Supreme Court issues an incredibly expedient decision. Election officials in the state need to certify the primary ballot by Jan. 5, in order to have time to print and send mail ballots for its March 5 primary.

Both the state GOP and the group of voters who challenged Trump’s eligibility — who are backed by the liberal government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of the major drivers behind the 14th Amendment challenges — have asked the Supreme Court to expedite review of the case, should the justices take it up, with the primary calendar fast approaching.

The Court should hear and decide the case on the merits in “an accelerated basis to reduce voter confusion and ensure that primary voters cast their vote knowing whether Trump is disqualified from the Presidency,” the voters’ attorneys wrote in a motion to the court filed on Thursday, asking for oral arguments in the case for mid-January.

 

[bnew]

The Supreme Court Wants No Part of Disqualifying Trump From the Ballot

The justices spent Thursday’s oral arguments looking for an off-ramp from kicking the former president out of the presidential race.

newrepublic.com

Matt Ford/

February 8, 2024

SCAREDY CATS

The Supreme Court Wants No Part of Disqualifying Trump From the Ballot​

The justices spent Thursday’s oral arguments looking for an off-ramp from kicking the former president out of the presidential race.​

NATHAN HOWARD/GETTY IMAGES

Jason Murray, lead attorney representing Colorado, speaks with members of the media outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court doesn’t seem to want to disqualify former President Donald Trump from political office for his role in the January 6 insurrection. The only question left for them is how to write a ruling that overturns the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to the contrary.

In more than two hours of oral arguments on Thursday, almost all of the justices rejected the idea that the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to bar Trump from running for president this November—or for any other future political office, for that matter. Even some of the court’s liberal justices seemed skeptical about the idea of applying the clause to Trump.

“I think the question you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States,” Justice Elena Kagan told Jason Murray, who argued on behalf of a group of voters who had sued the Colorado secretary of state to remove Trump from the ballot. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pointedly asked whether Trump, as a former president, even fell under the clause’s language.

The case, Trump v. Anderson, revolves around a few different legal disputes. The clause applies to virtually anyone who previously took an oath to support the Constitution by holding public office. If they subsequently took part in “insurrection or rebellion,” they are barred from serving in Congress, as a member of the Electoral College, or from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” Congress can remove individual disqualifications by a two-thirds vote of each chamber.

A group of voters sued to keep Trump off the ballot last year, arguing that his role in January 6 amounted to participation in an insurrection. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed in December in a 4–3 decision. The U.S. Supreme Court swiftly agreed to hear the case on an accelerated schedule.

At least a few of the justices appeared to be worried that states would use bogus claims to disqualify otherwise legitimate candidates. These fears are not wholly unfounded. As I noted earlier this week, a coalition of Republican governors and attorneys general suggested, in Goodfellas fashion, that such an event just might occur if Trump were to lose his suit to remain on the Colorado ballot. Some of the court’s conservative members amplified those threats during oral arguments.

“We have been told that if what Colorado did here is sustained, other states are going to retaliate and they are going to potentially exclude another candidate from the ballot,” Justice Samuel Alito said, in apparent reference to Biden. When Murray later argued that the courts would likely have to decide those cases as well and deem them frivolous, Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back.

“You might think they’re frivolous, but the people who are bringing them may not think they’re frivolous,” he told Murray. “Insurrection is a broad, broad term. And if there’s some debate about it, I suppose that will go into the decision and then eventually, what, we would be deciding whether it was an insurrection when one president did something as opposed to when somebody else did something else? And what do we do? Do we wait until near the time of counting the ballots and sort of go through which states are valid and which states aren’t?”

Some members of the court, including Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then appeared to coalesce around the idea that states can’t use the disqualification clause against federal officeholders. Alito, later echoed by Kavanaugh, noted that there wasn’t much of a historical record of states using the clause to disqualify federal officeholders. They reasoned that the absence of historical action could mean that it was precluded by historical practice.

This would be a convenient way to dispose of this particular case, but it will lead to other problems down the line. For one thing, it would invite other actors in the constitutional system to take action after the presidential election is over. If Trump wins in November and Democrats also hold both chambers of Congress, for example, they could theoretically decline to count Trump’s electoral votes because of his insurrectionist disqualification on January 6, 2025.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dinged Trump attorney Jonathan Mitchell for making an argument that essentially only applied to his client. Since Trump never held prior elected office, he would be the only president in at least two hundred years who wouldn’t fall under the clause’s terms. “But just so we’re clear, under that reading, only [Trump] is disqualified because virtually every other president except Washington has taken an oath to support the Constitution, correct?”

“That’s right,” Mitchell replied. He noted that it was an open question whether John Adams would count since he took an oath as vice president, but others hypothetically would. “Yes, President Biden would certainly be covered,” he added. “He took the oath as a member of Congress. And that’s true of every previous president.”

But Mitchell’s overall arguments did not appear to persuade any of the justices, who instead tried to find their own off-ramp to dispose of this case. At one point, Mitchell conceded that his distinction of “office” versus “officer of the United States” didn’t make much sense for early American leaders to adopt. “Is that rule a sensible one?” Kagan asked, referring to the Constitution’s original Framers. “You know, if they had thought about it, what reason would they have given for that rule?”

“I don’t think there is a good rationale given that this was compromise legislation,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “And sometimes this happens with statutory compromises and even constitutional compromises.” Indeed, other legal scholars have pointed out that excluding the president from the “officer” category leads to all sorts of other problems, not least of which is that it would exempt him from the rule against holding positions in other branches of government.

Jackson, however, appeared to agree with that framework as a potential solution for the case. She tried to suggest that the amendment’s drafters intentionally omitted the presidency because their Reconstruction-era concerns were focused on other problems. “The pressing concern, at least as I see the historical record,” she explained, “was actually what was going on at lower levels of the government, the possible infiltration and embedding of insurrectionists into the state government apparatus and the real risk that former Confederates might return to power in the South via state-level elections either in local offices or as representatives of the states in Congress. And that’s a very different lens.”

But that would lead to an arguably even more absurd reading: that the amendment’s drafters thought ex-Confederates should be excluded from every public office in the republic except the one that commands the nation’s armed forces. If they sought to exclude anti-constitutional figures from public life, why would they leave an exception for the office where they could do the most damage?

I often note that oral arguments can be an imperfect window into the court’s thinking; the justices, given time to ruminate, often reach conclusions in their final decision that weren’t hinted at during their public deliberations. This does not seem to be one of those cases. Almost all of the justices seem fundamentally opposed to the idea that they should allow Colorado to disqualify Trump from the ballot. (Sotomayor was the only one who didn’t signal as much.) How exactly they get from that sensation to a workable ruling remains to be seen. But it would be stunning after Thursday’s arguments if the case went any other way.

Getting to what seems to be their preferred legal destination won’t be an easy endeavor. The justices will have to get around the plain text and intent of the disqualification clause, as well as the obviousness of what happened on January 6, 2021. “The Framers of Section 3 knew from painful experience that those who had violently broken their oaths to the Constitution couldn’t be trusted to hold power again because they could dismantle our constitutional democracy from within, and so they created a democratic safety valve,” Murray argued. “President Trump can go ask Congress to give him amnesty by a two-thirds vote. But, unless he does that, our Constitution protects us from insurrectionists.”

Some of the justices appeared uneasy with rendering a decision that would deprive millions of Americans of their preferred candidate. Murray, for his part, noted that Trump himself tried to do exactly that four years ago, except through illegal means instead of constitutional mechanisms. “The reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him,” he told the justices. “And the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance.” Since the court heard the case on an accelerated schedule, a decision could come within the next few weeks.