ASSOCIATED PRESS / DEC. 19
Former President Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives at a caucus rally in Waterloo, Iowa, this week.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s first presidential election under the Constitution’s insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take unilateral action as the U. S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump remains eligible to return to the White House.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ ruling follows an earlier ruling this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that expelled Trump from the election under Article 3 of the 14th Amendment. That ruling has been put on hold until the U. S. Supreme Court rules on whether Trump is barred from trespassing. the Civil War-era provision prohibiting those who “participate in insurrection” from holding public office.
The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows’ decision to Maine’s state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case. In the end, it is likely that the nation’s highest court will have the final say on whether Trump appears on the ballot in Maine and in the other states.
Bellows found that Trump may no longer run because of his past because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U. S. Capitol violated Article 3, which prohibits those who “participated in the insurrection” from holding ArrayBellows took the measure after some state. Residents, as well as a bipartisan organization of former lawmakers, challenged Trump’s stance on the election.
“I do not come to this conclusion lightly,” Bellows wrote in his 34-page decision. “I am aware that no secretary of state has ever denied a presidential candidate to stand for election on the basis of Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But I am also aware that no presidential candidate has ever participated in an insurrection. “
The Trump campaign criticized the move. ” We are witnessing in real time an attempt to borrow an election and disenfranchise the American voter,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
Legal experts said Thursday’s ruling demonstrates the need for the country’s court, which has never ruled on Article 3, to explain what states can do.
“It 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,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. “It seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later.”
While Maine has just four electoral votes, it’s one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine’s 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.
This is in contrast to Colorado, which Trump lost by thirteen percentage points in 2020 and where he is expected to run in November if he wins the Republican presidential nomination.
In his ruling, Bellows said the U. S. Supreme Court will most likely have the final say, but said it’s vital that it fulfill its official duty.
That earned him praise from former state lawmakers who filed one of the petitions forcing him to participate in the case.
“Secretary Bellows showed wonderful courage in her ruling, and we look forward to helping her defend her strong and correct resolution in court. “No elected official is above the law or our Constitution, and today’s resolution reaffirms this highest American principle,” Republican Kimberley Rosen, independent Thomas Saviello and Democrat Ethan Strimling said in a statement.
But the state’s Republicans were outraged.
“This is a sham decision that mimics Third World dictatorships,” Maine’s House Republican leader, Billy Bob Faulkingham, said in a statement. “It will not stand legal scrutiny. People have a right to choose their leaders devoid of mindless decisions by partisan hacks.”
The criticism wasn’t just along normal partisan lines, though. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents Maine’s 2nd congressional district that Trump won in 2020, noted on the social media site X that he’d voted to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 attack and doesn’t believe he should win next year’s election.
“However, 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,” Golden wrote.
Tuesday’s Trump crusade demanded that Bellows recuse himself from the case because he had tweeted in the past that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and lamented that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U. S. Senate following the attack on the Capitol. She refused to retreat.
“My resolution was based solely on the record presented to me at the hearing and in no way influenced my political association or private perspectives on the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” Bellows told The Associated Press late Thursday.
Bellows is a former head of the Maine bankruptcy of the American Civil Liberties Union. The seven justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, who split through a 4-3 vote on whether it deserves to be the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible. Under Article 3, they were appointed by the Democrats. Two liberal groups based in Washington, D. C. , have thrown the most demanding situations at Trump, Colorado and a handful of other states.
This has led Trump to claim that the dozens of lawsuits filed nationwide to remove him from the Section 3 vote are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent defenders are conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president unable to run again, as if he had not reached the age threshold established in the document (35 years) to hold office.
Likewise, until Bellows’ decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn’t have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.
The timing of the U. S. Supreme Court’s ruling is unclear, but both sides need it delivered quickly. The Colorado Republican Party appealed the Colorado Superior Court’s ruling on Wednesday, asking for an expedited timetable, and Trump is also expected to appeal within a week. The petitioners in the Colorado case suggested Thursday that the nation’s court adopt an even faster timeline so it can rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, will vote for Republican presidential elections. nomination. process.
The High Court will first have to reach an official settlement on the case, but legal experts consider that a certainty. Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing a realm of American governance where there is little judicial guidance.
The clause added in 1868 to prevent defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of strength in local and federal government. It prohibits anyone who has violated his oath to “defend” the Constitution from holding office. The provision used to ban a wide diversity of former Confederates from holding positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after a congressional amnesty in 1872 for the maximum number of former Confederates.
Legal historians claim that the only time this 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 used. It has been relaunched.
Last year, he subpoenaed through a court to indict a rural New Mexico county commissioner who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. A liberal organization attempted to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 election under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary, so his case was ignored and a ruling ruled in Greene’s favor.
Some critics of the move to exclude Trump warn that the provision could simply be used as a weapon in unforeseen 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’s 2020 murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The Colorado plaintiffs presented old evidence that even donating small amounts of cash to those seeking to join the Confederacy was grounds for prohibition under Section 3. Why, critics ask, wouldn’t this apply to Democrats like Harris today??
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