Colorado’s state Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of the recently decided case involving Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president again in 2024.
“A Denver District Court judge ruled last week that Trump should be placed on Colorado’s March presidential primary ballot, rejecting a lawsuit filed by six Colorado voters who argue that the Republican frontrunner is disqualified from office under a Civil War-era insurrection clause.
Although Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump ‘engaged in insurrection’ within the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which prohibits anyone who did so after taking an oath to support the Constitution from holding office again — she held that the clause does not apply to the presidency. Wallace’s order instructed Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, to place Trump on the ballot when certifying the list of primary candidates on January 5th.
The ruling drew an appeal an appeal first from Trump’s attorneys, who wrote that while they were satisfied with the outcome, Wallace’s opinion also contained ‘multiple grave jurisdictional and legal errors’, including her finding that Trump ‘incited an insurrection on January 6th, 2021’.
‘President Trump seeks review to ensure that if this Court takes up this case on appeal, it will consider the full scope of the constitutional, interpretive, and evidentiary issues’, Trump’s attorneys wrote to the Colorado Supreme Court, listing eleven different legal issues they want the state’s highest court to consider.
The list of issues revives many of the arguments Trump’s team made during a five-day trial in district court earlier this month, including questioning the definitions of ‘insurrection’ and ‘engaging’ under Section 3, disputing the secretary of state’s authority to disqualify candidates under the clause and attempts to discredit the investigation into the January 6th attack on the Capitol conducted by a select U.S. House of Representatives committee.
Plaintiffs in the case, backed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed their own appeal late on Monday, calling the finding that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency ‘nonsensical’.
That theory was first put forward in 2021 by two conservative law professors, Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman, who argue that the section’s reference to ‘an officer of the United States’ does not include the president.
Gerard Magliocca, a scholar of 19th-century constitutional law, was called as an expert witness by the plaintiffs during this month’s trial and testified that the position taken by Blackman and Tillman ‘so far is in the minority’ among academics who have studied the question. Echoing Magliocca, the plaintiffs’ appeal cited several pieces of historical evidence showing that Section 3, which was ratified in 1868 and aggressively enforced against ex-Confederates for a period of several years, was understood to apply to the president at the time.
‘Excluding the President and the Presidency from Section 3 would make no sense’, the plaintiffs wrote. ‘There would be no reason to prohibit insurrectionists from serving as mere presidential electors, and from holding every other office in the land, while allowing them to hold most the powerful and hence most dangerous office. Nor would there be any reason to allow insurrectionist former Presidents to hold office again, while excluding former low-level state officers’.
Attempts to bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment have been rejected by courts in several other states, including Michigan and Minnesota. But CREW and its supporters have sought to portray Wallace’s ruling in Colorado as a victory as they continue to build their case against Trump’s eligibility across the country”. -Chase Woodruff, Colorado Newsline
The Colorado appeal will be the third state Supreme Court ruling on whether Donald Trump will be eligible to appear on a Republican presidential primary ballot.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s apparent to everyone throughout the country by now that the justice system in the United States is currently being misused as a shield to protect the ruling establishment from prosecution and a weapon to go after its political opposition, namely Donald Trump and his supporters, far more regularly than was the case during the Trump administration.