Read the full decision.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
DENVER (AP) — The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.
The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War.
It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.
After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.
“You’d be saying a rebel who took up arms against the government couldn’t be a county sheriff, but could be the president,” attorney Jason Murray said in arguments before the court in early December.
The original article contains 639 words, the summary contains 234 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This kind of news gets you in the Christmas spirit! Cheers!
Great idea, ban the frontrunner of the only other viable Party from running for office, this won’t have any consequences at all!
Perfectly valid action to take when that front runner is a traitor to the nation he swore to serve.
If that’s true then people votes should decide that, if you don’t believe the people then the nation is doomed
What’s the point what’s the point of having an election if we’re just going to ignore the laws anyway?
The laws that say he can run for office are also on the same constitution that say he’s no longer elligible, what is this cherry picking laws nonsense?
You think election denialism was bad before? Just wait until it’s literally illegal for Trump to get elected lol
The nation is only as strong as we’re willing to fight corruption and enforce laws.
If Trump faces no consequences it will be easier for the next dictator wannabe to seize control.
Pissing off maga morons is a small price to pay.
Texas is talking about taking Biden off the ballot.
This country is barely hanging on dude
This is exactly why this is a terrible idea from the get-go. This will just embolden every state to pick and choose who they want on a ballot.
Edit: Just to add onto the point a little bit… Take note of how many red states there are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
Now imagine that 100% of them now push Blue off the ballots all together. And the ones that are light, could force a dark reddening, Blue would NEVER win an election ever again. Just letting a court choose to define what happened on Jan 6 as an insurrection leaves this problem on the table. It’s also against the American motto of Innocent until proven guilty to just let a court decide that without trial and jury. None of the current cases against Trump have the “insurrection” as a charge, so he’s never been guilty of it… including the impeachment. Find him guilty, like the southern office holders, then you have a case. But jumping the gun like this just makes you all look looney tunes and opens the doors to all sorts of abuse that WILL NOT work in your favor.
Great idea, don’t hold former presidents to account when they attempt to subvert democracy, that won’t have any consequences at all!
If they wanted to hold him to account they’d have charged him immediately after the insurrection, rather than waiting for the next election. Why did they wait so long? Now he’s campaigning and can use every decision against him to rally his supporters into a frothing mob.
You mean like the impeachment or any of the trials we’ve had for his criminal behavior? Yeah, why didn’t they do that immediately??? And while we’re at it, why does the legal system move so slowly???
As a foreigner I am surprised it took this long. Will likely not lessen the support for Trump, but nearly nothing will at this point.
As a foreigner who’s spent a lot of time in America, this may actually be good for Trump. I am not 100% sure how elections work in the US, but at most this will keep his name off a ballot Trump would never win and at best it will ensure his name has to be on every ballot. Assuming the SCOTUS overturns it, it sets a precedent that the POTUS is not an officer and therefore isn’t included in any legal language that concerns officers. Which opens up expansion of the powers of the executive. Still assuming that the SCOTUS overturns it it could play right into the Project 2025 playbook.
What will happen next? I assume the (federal) supreme court will simply shoot it down. But I’d love to hear other opinions!
It’s a toss up from what i can tell. Generally speaking it’s up to the states to determine how elections are done. And the supreme court doesn’t like to tell states how to do it. That’s why gendering is up to state laws and decisions.
But Trump’s court… Who knows? I’m willing to bet Thomas will be flying in an awful lot of private jets to nice resorts over the next few years.
https://learnconlaw.com/78-the-disqualification-clause goes into this in detail - the short answer is that the federal supreme court will probably rule that the amendment doesn’t specifically call out the president as a person who can be disqualified and overturn the decision.
There is an argument to be made that the president is a “federal officer” so the ruling does stand, and that the intent was to bar confederates from public office so it would be weird to read the law as disqualifying a person from low level state office but not from the presidency, but it seems unlikely that the court would choose to do that given how partisan it is
There is an argument to be made that the president is a “federal officer” so the ruling does stand
What’s the argument that he’s not a federal officer? Basically everything in the Constitution refers to the office of the presidency, so claiming the president isn’t an officer sounds like some bullshit that idiots would come up with. Which makes sense why the republicans are trying that.
The argument that could be made is that in most of the rest of the constitution, anything that involves things the president can or can’t do explicitly says “the president”, so having an extensive list of positions that could be disqualified that doesn’t mention the president by name implies that the president isn’t included.
It’s not a good argument, and I suspect in saner times it would be pretty clear that the intent is that Trump can’t run.
