The left’s insatiable — and arguably quixotic — quest to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot is a team effort to be sure. But two well-funded leftist groups in particular are leading the charge in the campaign to take Trump down with a bogus reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the lawfare arm of political strategist David Brock’s network of Democrat-aligned organizations, has dominated national headlines with its Colorado lawsuit — the only “successful” challenge to Trump’s primary ballot status to date.
The banal-sounding Free Speech for People laid the groundwork for the constitutionally suspect challenges after Trump left office in 2021. The nonprofit has thrown its weight behind a so-called “Section 3” effort, browbeating election offices nationwide to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot on the spurious grounds that the 45th president promoted an insurrection to overturn the 2020 election. They insist he incited the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“What we’re seeing in Colorado, Maine, even in Wisconsin … is a complete abuse of the Constitution. This is not at all what it was designed to do, the insurrection clause, that they cite,” said Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, operator of nonprofit and leftist activist tracker Influence Watch. “They are using bogus legal theories to try and keep one of the leading presidential candidates off the ballot, and they’re doing it entirely with left-wing dark money.”
Thayer is not alone in his assessment. Constitutional law experts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to make quick work of tossing out December’s 4-3 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court because, as the Public Interest Legal Foundation and former Federal Election Commission member Hans Von Spakovsky assert in court filings, the legal viability of the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, the foundation for the challenge, “is suspect” at best.
But CREW and its partner in lawfare have perhaps an even bigger goal in mind than their impossible mission to bump Trump from the ballot, Thayer and others assert: They’re building a case to dramatically alter the Supreme Court as we know it.
In late December, CREW celebrated arguably its most notorious victory when the Colorado Supreme Court became the first — and only — court thus far to block Trump from the primary ballot. The court’s left-leaning majority agreed with voters represented by CREW. In the 4-3 ruling, the court embraced the narrative that the former president’s “direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary.”
The state supreme court bought into the specious reasoning that Trump should be disqualified from the presidential ballot based on Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, which bars from certain offices individuals “having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States” if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government or have given “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” In the clause’s list of specific offices to which it applies, the presidency is noticeably absent.
Furthermore, the ruling disregards the 14th Amendment’s core principles of due process and equal protection under the law. Trump has not been convicted of any such crime. He is not responsible for the decisions and actions of others, and moreover, poll after poll finds many Americans are unconvinced the Jan. 6 protests and riots constituted an “insurrection.”
https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/06/meet-the-two-groups-behind-plot-to-kick-trump-off-the-ballot-and-he-isnt-the-only-target/