Maine\u2019s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state\u2019s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution\u2019s insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take action unilaterally as the US Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Trump remains eligible to return to the White House.<\/p>\n
The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That decision has been stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump is barred by the Civil War-era provision, which prohibits those who \u201cengaged in insurrection\u201d from holding office.<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows\u2019 decision to Maine\u2019s state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case. In the end, the nation\u2019s highest court will likely have the final say on whether Trump appears on the ballot in Maine and the other states.<\/p>\n
Bellows found that Trump could no longer run for his prior job because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol violated Section 3, which bans from office those who \u201cengaged in insurrection.\u201d Bellows made the ruling after some state residents, including a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, challenged Trump\u2019s position on the ballot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not reach this conclusion lightly,\u201d Bellows wrote in her 34-page decision. \u201cI am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign immediately slammed the ruling. \u201cWe are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter,\u201d campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. Legal experts said that Thursday\u2019s ruling demonstrates the need for the nation\u2019s highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3, to clarify what states can do.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear that these decisions are going to keep popping up, and inconsistent decisions reached (like the many states keeping Trump on the ballot over challenges) until there is final and decisive guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court,\u201d Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. \u201cIt seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Maine has just four electoral votes, it\u2019s one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine\u2019s electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there, should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate, could have outsized implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s in contrast to Colorado, which Trump lost by 13 percentage points in 2020 and where he wasn\u2019t expected to compete in November if he wins the Republican presidential nomination. In her decision, Bellows acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have the final word but said it was important she did her official duty. That won her praise from the former state lawmakers who filed one of the petitions forcing her to consider the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecretary Bellows showed great courage in her ruling, and we look forward to helping her defend her judicious and correct decision in court. No elected official is above the law or our constitution, and today\u2019s ruling reaffirms this most important of American principles,\u201d Republican Kimberly Rosen, independent Thomas Saviello and Democrat Ethan Strimling said in a statement.<\/p>\n
But other Republicans in the state were outraged. \u201cThis is a sham decision that mimics Third World dictatorships,\u201d Maine\u2019s House Republican leader, Billy Bob Faulkingham, said in a statement. \u201cIt will not stand legal scrutiny. People have a right to choose their leaders devoid of mindless decisions by partisan hacks.\u201d<\/p>\n
The criticism wasn\u2019t just along normal partisan lines, though. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents Maine\u2019s 2nd congressional district that Trump won in 2020, noted on the social media site X that he\u2019d voted to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 attack and doesn\u2019t believe he should win next year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, we are a nation of laws, and therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot,\u201d Golden wrote. The Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she\u2019d previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an \u201cinsurrection\u201d and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,\u201d Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night. Bellows is a former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.<\/p>\n
All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats. Two Washington, D.C.-based liberal groups have launched the most serious prior challenges to Trump, in Colorado and a handful of other states.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent advocates have been conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president ineligible to run again, just as if he failed to clear the document\u2019s age threshold \u2013 35 years old \u2013 for the office.<\/p>\n
Likewise, until Bellows\u2019 decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn\u2019t have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court. The timing on the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s decision is unclear, but both sides want it fast.<\/p>\n
Colorado\u2019s Republican Party appealed the Colorado high court decision on Wednesday, urging an expedited schedule, and Trump is also expected to file an appeal within the week. The petitioners in the Colorado case on Thursday urged the nation\u2019s highest court to adopt an even faster schedule so it could rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, are scheduled to vote in the Republican presidential nominating process.<\/p>\n
The high court needs to formally accept the case first, but legal experts consider that a certainty. The Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing an area of U.S. governance where there\u2019s scant judicial guidance. The clause was added in 1868 to keep defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of power in local and federal government.<\/p>\n
It prohibits anyone who broke an oath to \u201csupport\u201d the Constitution from holding office. The provision was used to bar a wide range of ex-Confederates from positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after an 1872 congressional amnesty for most former Confederates. Legal historians believe the only time the provision was used in the 20th Century was in 1919, when it was cited to deny a House seat to a socialist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. But since the Jan. 6 attack, it has been revived.<\/p>\n
Last year, it was cited by a court to remove a rural New Mexico County Commissioner who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. One liberal group tried to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 ballot under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary so his case was thrown out, and a judge ruled for Greene.<\/p>\n
Some critics of the movement to bar Trump warn that the provision could be weaponized in unexpected ways. They note that conservatives could argue, for example, that Vice President Kamala Harris is likewise barred from office because she raised bail funds for people arrested during the unrest following George Floyd\u2019s 2020 murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs in Colorado presented historical evidence that even the donation of small sums to money to those seeking to join the Confederacy was grounds for being barred by Section 3. Why, critics have asked, wouldn\u2019t that apply to Democrats like Harris today?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maine\u2019s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state\u2019s presidential primary ballot under the\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":22357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2952,6840,772,2401,747,168,2398,679,2691,6841,6843,6842,2399],"class_list":["post-22354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-ballot","tag-barred-from-office","tag-civil-war","tag-colorado","tag-congress","tag-donald-trump","tag-insurrection-clause","tag-january-6-riots","tag-maine","tag-maine-secretary-of-state-shenna-bellows","tag-scotus","tag-section-3-of-the-14th-amendment","tag-us-constitution"],"reading_time":"7 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}