Finally, there is a winning judicial challenge to Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president in 2024.
Another first in US politics was the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove the former president from the Republican Party’s upcoming primary ballot.
This ruling creates a new conflict between the political campaign and the legal system in America by further obfuscating the boundaries between them.
But Mr. Trump is already utilizing this new judicial setback to his political advantage, so it is unlikely to have a significant negative impact on his efforts to win back the White House.
It’s possible that the activists who initiated the case in Colorado—a leftist watchdog organization and a coalition of Republican and independent voters opposed to Trump—are rejoicing in their success.
However, the reaction from Democratic lawmakers thus far—those who will face voters in the coming year and are attempting to stop Mr. Trump at the polls—tells a different tale.
They don’t want to fight over this.
The secretary of state of Colorado, Jena Griswold, who had refrained from taking unilateral action to prevent Mr. Trump from participating in the state’s primary, responded to the court’s ruling on Wednesday with a remark that was not very enthusiastic.
She remarked, “There may be an appeal of this decision.” “I will follow the court decision that is in place at the time of ballot certification.”
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Her apparent unwillingness to comment, along with other Democrats’ comparatively silent positions, may have something to do with the bleak future of the Colorado challenge.
Already, Mr. Trump’s team has pledged to appeal the ruling all the way to the US Supreme Court. New York University constitutional law scholar Samuel Issacharoff predicts that the appeal will almost definitely be accepted, especially in light of the fact that comparable cases have been reviewed and dismissed by other state courts.
“It cannot be that the national candidacy for presidency is determined on a state by state basis,” he stated. “That would be a breakdown of the democratic order.”
There is currently a conservative six-to-three majority on the Supreme Court. Furthermore, even though the three justices nominated by Mr. Trump have previously demonstrated a readiness to rule against the outgoing president, Mr. Issacharoff thought they would be very hesitant to be perceived as restricting voters’ options at the polls.
Democrats might also be concerned about how the legal challenges and the Colorado ruling fit into one of Mr. Trump’s campaign’s main themes, which is that the ruling class sees him as a threat to their authority and is prepared to undermine the will of the people to keep him out of office.
The Colorado decision was referred to as “completely flawed” by Trump Campaign Spokesman Steven Cheung. Democrats, he claimed, were losing faith in President Joe Biden and “are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November” as a result.
Republicans who oppose Mr. Trump are essentially supporting him, just as they have done in each of the former president’s court cases this year.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida referred to the Colorado ruling as a power abuse. It was announced by Vivek Ramaswamy that he will take his name off the state’s primary ballot. The Colorado Republican Party has vowed to have a caucus to select its nominee instead of holding a primary at all.
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“We’re going to win this the right way,” declared Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and possibly Mr. Trump’s strongest opponent. “The last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot.”
Democrats could be irritated that, at least thus far, Mr. Trump appears to have escaped any consequences for his involvement in the attack on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, both politically and legally.
Two grand juries, one in Georgia and one in federal court, have indicted the former president on counts pertaining to his efforts to rig the 2020 election. However, months, if not more, remain until those trials, which will be determined by citizen juries rather than judges. Furthermore, the fact that special counsel Jack Smith, who is in charge of the federal case, has only filed certain accusations rather than depending on concrete evidence that Mr. Trump organized an uprising, may also be instructive.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling may have provided the dramatic moment of responsibility that some of Trump’s detractors have been longing for, but it also probably won’t last. Ultimately, it might increase rather than decrease the likelihood that the outgoing president takes office again.
