UPDATED: Supreme Court votes to keep Trump's name on Colorado ballot
UPDATED: Supreme Court votes to keep Trump's name on Colorado ballot
The Colorado Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ruling that is keeping Donald Trump off Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot
Update on March 4: In a 9-0 vote, the Supreme Court agreed that Colorado must keep Trump’s name on the primary ballot. In an unsigned opinion, the justices unanimously agreed that no state, acting on its own, should be able to remove a candidate for national office and that this is an action that could only be (potentially) implemented at the federal level. They dodged Colorado’s insurrection claim altogether.
Update on February 29: In a perfect way to end Black History Month 2024, Cook County Circuit Judge Tracie Porter in Illinois removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot based on the 14th Amendment’s so-called “insurrectionist ban.”
“The Illinois State Board of Election shall remove Donald J. Trump from the ballot for the General Primary Election on March 19, 2024, or cause any votes cast for him to be suppressed,” said Judge Porter in an official report.
Writer's note on Dec. 29, 2023: As of Friday morning, news broke that Maine has removed Trump from their ballot. This will be the second state to do so before the primaries. Maine’s laws mandate that the Maine Superior Court must make a decision within 20 days from Thursday, or January 17, to honor Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ decision to remove him.
The following post was originally written on Dec. 28, 2023.
When I think of Colorado, I think of snow, skiing and being one of two states to legalize recreational marijuana. The latter legal stance should’ve let me know to keep more of an eye on them walking to the beat of their own drum, but I just didn’t see the Donald Trump ballot ban coming.
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After living in Michigan for two years, I wasn’t even slightly surprised that this Midwestern state opted out of banning Donald Trump on their presidential primary ballots. But on December 19, in a 4-3 vote, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump is “constitutionally ineligible to run in 2024 because the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office covers his conduct on January 6, 2021.”
Colorado as “Woke Disney”? You don’t say!
Recommended Read: “Ben Garrison, can I get a seasonal pass to Woke Disney? ~ How the Woke Disney World image doesn’t do what it thinks it does”
According to the U.S. Senate’s official site, the 14th amendment includes the following:
The 14th amendment banned those who “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding any civil, military, or elected office without the approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate.
Of course, I didn’t expect Colorado Republicans to just shrug off the removal of Trump’s name. CNN reports that the Republican Party has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this decision, although Trump hasn’t filed an appeal yet. But now that it’s in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court to decide, Colorado’s pause on the ruling (set to expire on January 4) is outranked until the higher court decides to take on the case or allow the state to decide (again).
Their decision on this one ballot will determine what other states can and can’t do on their own ballots when it comes to “insurrectionists” being presidents.
Some of the arguments that Colorado Republicans used to reject this ruling were more or less a semantics debate, one of which was the word “president” specifically isn’t listed in the 14th Amendment. Apparently “elected office” wasn’t good enough. Either way, the Colorado Supreme Court rejected this argument.
Then, in the amendment argument that is painfully overused, Republicans debated about the First Amendment, arguing “unprecedented disregard for the First Amendment right of political parties to select the candidates of their choice.”
Keep in mind that this political party’s presidential choice cheered on a tragedy that led to approximately 150 officers from the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department and local agencies being injured. Additionally, hundreds of workers were traumatized by the mob.
While the Blue Lives Matter argument escalated to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement, apparently only anti-Black Lives Matter activists respect officers when it suits them. Meanwhile, officers died due to the Capitol Riot. Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police was attacked by the mob and died on Jan. 7. Two other officers (Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department and Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police) died by suicide a few days after the attack, reports the New York Times.
And Trump’s egging on before the Capitol Riot:
“We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women — and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.
In part of his next quote from this speech, Trump went on to say, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
But when the Capitol Riot was anything but peaceful, his response was not to call off the violence. Instead, it was to call Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a newly elected Republican from Alabama, to convince him to make additional objections to the Electoral College vote in order to block Congress’ certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden.
The irony is in the middle of this second call (after calling the wrong number initially), senators were asked to move to a secure location. And somehow Trump and his now-bankrupt attorney Rudy Guiliani still didn’t see how not calming down the rioters was making a horrendous situation even worse.
While I never wanted Trump to be president in the first place, even those who did should see why something is psychologically wrong with damn near every decision Trump made from 2016 to 2020 and especially the one on January 6, 2021.
Colorado got it right by removing the riot instigator from the ballot. Now let’s see if the U.S. Supreme Court with three Trump appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) gets it wrong — again.
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