By Mike Huckabee
January 4, 2024
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On Wednesday, President Trump appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that found him ineligible to be on the primary ballot in that state. Those justices, 4-3, claimed he engaged in and incited an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and is thus prevented by the 14th Amendment from running for any office.
It asks SCOTUS this question: “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”
This appeal is no surprise to anyone who knows President Trump, and in case anyone misread him, his attorneys announced their intention shortly after the Colorado ruling. And on December 27, the Colorado GOP, joined by six voters and the secretary of state’s office, also filed a petition for immediate review by the Supreme Court.
The significance: President Trump remains on the ballot unless SCOTUS were to reject the petition by January 4 or otherwise rules against Trump.
January 4 --- that’s today!
Why so soon? In that state, it’s the day before certification of the ballots for the primary. January 5 is the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify all those ballots, and it cannot be changed. Once they’re certified, no challenge is allowed. As they say, it is what it is.
Catherine Yang at THE EPOCH TIMES has an informative report on the President’s legal argument. They say that over the past few months, more than 60 (!) lawsuits and administrative challenges have been filed against him to keep him off the ballot. All of these are based on allegations that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
“First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not ‘insurrection’ as that term is used in Section 3,” Trump’s petition reads. The amendment was passed after the Civil War, and insurrection was understood to mean “the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” they argued. More than 600,000 died in the war, and “focus on war-making” in the text was the “logical result.
(As you certainly know, this amendment was ratified after the Civil War, to prevent those who had picked up their guns and literally waged war against the United States from serving in public office. And even they could be permitted that privilege again with a two-thirds vote of Congress.)
“By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent. In the summer of 2020 alone, violent protestors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, for over 50 days, repeatedly assaulted federal officers and set fire to the courthouse, all in support of a purported political agenda opposed to the authority of the United States.”
They also argue that the courts don’t have jurisdiction on this question: “Indeed, every federal court that addressed this issue with regard to the eligibility of President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.”
Of course, you know that Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows singlehandedly decided that Trump couldn’t be on the GOP primary ballot up there. (And, gosh, something tells me she’s not even in the GOP!) Surely knowing how far over the line she had gone, she did at least put her dastardly plan on hold: “I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Supreme Court rules on any appeal or the time to appeal has expired.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/
For when you have time, the NEW YORK POST has a more detailed story that we highly recommend…
Attorney General Bill Barr has made it clear he does not want Trump to get the GOP nomination, but said this week that “the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.” I wonder if he’s considered, though, that for the left, being “destructive of our political order” is not a bug; it’s a feature!
They also could backfire and help Trump, a scenario that, knowing Barr, likely motivates his words as well.
“As a legal matter,” he said, “states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection.” It’s Congress --- not the individual states ---who has the authority to do that, he said.
Our whole election system could “collapse in chaos,” he warned, if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedural standards to block candidates.
He had additional words of criticism, specifically for the left: “[This effort] is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretched the law beyond its proper bounds...Nothing is more destructive to democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries.”
As you know, Special Counsel Jack Smith did not specifically charge Trump with insurrection, and he certainly would’ve done that if he thought it would stick. Instead, he charged him with four other felonies:
--- conspiracy to defraud the United States
--- “conspiracy against rights”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/
(If you read the description at the link, you’ll find it sounds very much like what Jack Smith is trying to do!)
--- conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding
--- “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding”
The Supreme Court is going to be ruling on two of these charges soon, in the case United States v. (Joseph) Fischer (one of the OTHER J6 defendants)… As legal analyst Margot Cleveland says, ”It is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the ‘crimes’ the special counsel charged are not crimes at all.”
If you’d like to get into the weeds on statutory interpretation and how it relates to Trump’s J6 case, we recommend taking time with her article. Cleveland says a reasonable prosecutor would put the brakes on Trump’s criminal trial until the issues about these charges can be resolved by the Supreme Court, but that the special counsel and the district court “have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than a year away.” Smith may be trying Trump on charges that don’t even exist, she says, lamenting that half the country doesn’t seem to care.
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