The Colorado Republican Party on Wednesday appealed that state’s Supreme Court decision that found former President Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency, the potential first step to a showdown at the nation’s highest court over the meaning of a 155-year-old constitutional provision that bans from office those who “engaged in insurrection.”
The first impact of the appeal is to extend the stay of the 4-3 ruling from Colorado’s highest court, which put its decision on pause until Jan. 4, the day before the state’s primary ballots are due at the printer, or until an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is finished. Trump himself has said he still plans to appeal the ruling to the nation’s highest court as well.
To me, all of these cases seem ridiculous. Trump is simply ineligible to hold office — full stop. The fourteenth clearly spells out the remedy, which does not include litigating in court. It states:
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
So there it is — the amendment should be decided by Congress. Not the courts. Not the voters.
Also, who cares if he ends up on a ballot? States would have a responsibility to invalidate his electors (should he win any) who would be engaging in violation of the fourteenth by voting for an insurrectionist and therefore they too are ineligible to hold office. In my opinion, the whole exercise is a waste of time designed to protect someone not worth pissing on if he were on fire.
Republicans know they lose if they do that. Republicans don’t control 2/3 of both houses of Congress.
The lawsuits are there to force a decision on whether the amendment even applies in the first place. The Republican line is still that there was no insurrection.
There is no mechanism for any state to second-guess electors after an election. That’s kind of a bad thing to have.
It’s not really a waste of time for the d’s, down ballot voting is a thing. If trump isn’t on the ballot, a lot won’t vote at all and this probably worries the r’s.
States would have a responsibility to invalidate his electors (should he win any)
While true, I think the bigger responsibility is for Congress to disregard any electoral votes for an ineligible candidate, and that’s going to be a much tougher fight.
Anything being decided at the state level just feels like theatrics and largely meaningless, especially in states that are very unlikely to win for Trump in the first place.
Dave Williams is the Colorado GOP chair and has stolen most of the donations they have received. They have zero funding to fight this fight.
source?
And the SC is going to do what the SC is going to do.
Because the party decided rather than fight for Obama’s pick, it was better to use trump appointing a SC judge as a threat to get people to vote for Hillary.
With a healthy sprinkling of RBG not retiring when she should have.
Our SC system is completely fucked. Republicans know it and are happy about it, the DNC just want people to stop talking about how they fucked up so badly so they won’t try to fix it.
With how young the Republican picks are, this isn’t just going to solve itself, those assholes will be on the bench for decades. We can’t just ignore how fucked it is
Something something the seeds of freedom and watering them
This is actually a state issue, the courts have repeatedly found that how a state selects its electors is their business.
Yeah, I imagine they should have fought the ruling that found him to have partaken in insurrection.
Wow, I didn’t know that the deadline was only a week away
As expected…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Colorado high court ruled that applies to Trump in the wake of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, intended to stop the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
“The Colorado Supreme Court has removed the leading Republican candidate from the primary and general ballots, fundamentally changing the course of American democracy,” the party’s attorneys wrote Wednesday.
If Trump ends up off the ballot in Colorado, it would have minimal effect on his campaign because he doesn’t need the state, which he lost by 13 percentage points in 2020, to win the Electoral College in the presidential election.
Sean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs seeking to disqualify Trump in Colorado, said on a legal podcast last week that he hopes the nation’s highest court hurries once it accepts the case, as he expects it will.
They argue the plain meaning of the constitutional language bars him from running again, just as clearly as if he didn’t meet the document’s minimum age of 35 for the presidency.
He continued that on Wednesday as he cheered a ruling earlier that day by the Michigan Supreme Court leaving him on the ballot, at least for the primary, in that state.
The original article contains 700 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Bet they won’t have standing.
They don’t even have the funds for a lawyer, the Colorado GOP is bankrupt.
They won’t have standing because they are not personally harmed and SCOTUS doesn’t want to rule. It’ll take Trump himself to bring the case.
Removed by mod
Exactly
Supreme Court really cares about standing these days. How many cases have this court allowed in just to do right wing changes?
But, those were different. They wanted to rule on those, but not this.
I’m saying it won’t stop them if they suddenly decide to this time. Or get paid too
RBG is the cause of all the country’s problems. All she had to was retire and rude off in the sunset. Instead, she’ll go down in history as one of the problems. Every single elected official and judge should have term limits.
If she had retired, the court would still be 5-4 Conservative.
That’s exaggeration to the point of being just plain false…but she did totally tarnish her own legacy with the way she handled the latter years of her term, setting her own causes back decades, and greatly diminishing the regard for the court.
