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.
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.
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