dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

After Colorado boots Trump from ballot, decision in similar Maine challenge expected Friday

The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday removed former president Donald J. Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot and similar challenges have been brought in multiple states, including Maine.

Across the country, dozens of lawsuits have been filed to disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also known as the disqualification clause, which was crafted to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It prohibits anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it from holding elective office. The measure has been used only a handful of times.

A Trump spokesperson said the Colorado ruling “attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”

In Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is expected to rule Friday on whether Trump’s name should appear on that state’s primary ballot in March, Spectrum News reported.

Attorneys for the advocates seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, including former Democratic Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling and former GOP state Senator Kimberly Rosen, squared off last week against lawyers for Trump at State House hearing, the network reported.

“The challengers have the burden of providing sufficient evidence to invalidate the petition,” Bellows’s office said in a statement before last week’s hearing. “At the hearing there will be an opportunity for both the challengers and the candidate to present oral testimony of witnesses as well as additional documentary evidence, and to make oral argument pertaining to the challenge in light of that evidence.”

One of the complaints filed in the Maine matter says Trump “engaged in insurrection” against the US Constitution and “is now ineligible to hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.”

The complaint adds that because “Trump is not eligible to hold the office of President of the United States, his declaration is false, and his consent and primary petitions are void.”

Advocates allege that Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and allowed the violence to rage for hours. He faces a separate criminal indictment for his alleged role in the insurrection, one of four criminal cases he currently faces. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and decried the various proceedings against him as a political witch hunt.

“Despite knowing the risk of violence and that the crowd was angry and armed, Trump incited violence [in a pre-insurrection speech] both explicitly and implicitly,” the Maine complaint says. “He repeatedly called out [then-Vice President Mike] Pence, told the crowd to ‘fight like hell’ and used other variations of ‘fight’ 20 times, repeatedly insisted that ‘we’ (including the agitated crowd) could not let the certification [of Joe Biden’s victory] happen, and promised that he would march with them to the Capitol.”

Trump is “ineligible to hold any office under the United States, least of all the office of President,” the complaint concludes.

Lawyers for Trump objected to the hearing, arguing that state election officials have minimal jurisdiction in determining candidate qualifications and even less in interpreting the insurrection clause, Maine Public Radio reported.

Bellows’s ruling will likely be appealed regardless of how she decides, the radio station reported, setting up a potential battle in the courts.

Elsewhere, courts in Michigan and Minnesota have refused to order that Trump be removed from primary election ballots, either because Congress has failed to speak on the matter or because the decision to place nominees on the ballot is up to political parties, not courts.

An effort to keep Trump off the ballot in New Hampshire failed in October. The plaintiff, John Anthony Castro of Texas, had claimed Trump is constitutionally ineligible for the presidency because he aided an insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But the court said that although Castro, a longshot GOP candidate, had successfully filed to appear on the ballot, he isn’t actually competing with Trump to win the primary and hadn’t established legal standing to bring the lawsuit.

“The evidence shows that Castro has not campaigned in New Hampshire or elsewhere. Castro has not provided any evidence suggesting that he has voters or contributors in New Hampshire or elsewhere, or that he will benefit from voter or contributor defections from Trump to himself,” US District Court Joseph N. Laplante wrote. “To the contrary, he acknowledges that he will not win any delegates in the primary.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/20/metro/after-colo-boots-trump-ballot-decision-similar-maine-challenge-expected-friday/

https://archive.ph/4llla#selection-1769.0-1865.410