Former President Donald Trump is urging the United States Supreme Court to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove him from the state’s ballot.
Trump’s attorneys submitted a petition to the high court on Thursday outlining their arguments for why the state court erred in issuing the unusual ruling last month.
“The Court should overturn the Colorado ruling because President Trump is not even subject to Section 3, since he is not an ‘official of the United States’ under the Constitution. Even if President Trump were liable to section 3, he did not ‘engage in’ anything that qualified as ‘insurrection,’” Trump’s lawyers said.
The measures, according to the Trump campaign, “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots.”
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled this month that Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run in 2024 because the 14th Amendment’s barring on insurrectionists holding office applies to his conduct on January 6, 2021.
Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court decided to hear the case after Trump filed an appeal. The justices are also involved in other areas that could affect the federal criminal case against the former president.
The Colorado ruling has been put on hold while the US Supreme Court decides the matter, and the state’s top election official has validated the 2024 presidential primary ballots, which include Trump’s name on the Republican ballot. If the courts rule that Trump is ineligible for public office before the Colorado primary, any votes cast for him will be invalidated.
Oral arguments in the Colorado case are planned for February 8.
Republican friends predict a ‘parade of horribles’ if Trump is gone
On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and scores of other Republican lawmakers backed Trump at the Supreme Court.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, Republicans claim that the Colorado Supreme Court “severely intrudes” on Congress’ sovereignty by enabling the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” to be implemented without congressional authorization.
The Colorado ruling “will only supercharge state officials to conjure bases for labeling political opponents as having engaged in insurrection,” they added, arguing that the justices should overturn the decision “to minimize the partisan incentive to boot opponents off the ballot” under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”
A group of Republican secretaries of state also asked the court to ban other secretaries of state from dismissing candidates.
“Any other result leads to a foreseeable and unfortunate parade of horribles,” they stated in the letter.
“If Secretaries of State—partisan elected officials—are the only ones who can judge who fulfills the ambiguous terms of Section Three, there are few obvious safeguards in place to avoid abuse.“
“A disqualification judgment would most likely be unreviewable and issued without any of the constitutional safeguards of due process that our system takes for granted in far less serious situations. If the prohibition from receiving a social security check warrants constitutional protection, surely disqualification from voting does as well,” the brief said.
The brief was submitted by secretaries of state from Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
So far, Trump has been taken from the ballot in Colorado and Maine, but both verdicts have been placed on hold pending a decision from the US Supreme Court. On Wednesday, a Maine judge returned that case to the Maine Secretary of State and instructed her to wait for the ultimate conclusion of the Colorado case.
Judges across the country are closely monitoring this case. Last week, the Oregon Supreme Court dismissed a similar complaint, informing the anti-Trump litigants that they may be able to refile it later, depending on what the US Supreme Court does in the Colorado case.