Colorado judge finds Trump led insurrection in January 2021
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A Colorado judge has rejected an attempt to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot based on the claim that he is constitutionally barred from office because of the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
The major decision issued Friday by Colorado District Judge Sarah Wallace comes after judges in Minnesota and Michigan also refused to remove Trump from that state’s Republican primary ballots.
These three high-profile challenges against Trump, which had the backing of well-funded advocacy groups, have so far failed to remove him from a single ballot, with the 2024 primary season fast approaching.
Wallace said she was keeping the former president on the ballot because the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban” does not apply to presidents, though she found that “Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement, and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech.”
The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, says American officials who take an oath to support the Constitution are banned from future office if they “engaged in insurrection.” But the Constitution doesn’t say how to enforce the ban, and it has only been applied twice since 1919 – which is why many experts view these lawsuits as long shots.
The provision explicitly bans insurrectionists from serving as US senators, representatives, and even presidential electors – but it does not say presidents. It says it covers “any office, civil or military, under the United States,” and Wallace ruled that this does not include the office of the presidency.
“After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States,’ did not include the President of the United States,” Wallace wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”
Whether the 14th amendment’s provisions regarding disqualification apply to presidential candidates is ambiguous enough to make applying them a bad idea from a purely pragmatic standpoint. Trump is going to lose the popular vote next year by many millions, even if he’s on every state ballot. Taking him off a couple is the kind of thing that will have no practical effect on his electoral chances, but will fill his followers with even more rage and paranoia, if that’s possible.
It’s also a sign of how inured we’ve become to everything in this country that judges can find that, as a formal legal matter, the president of the United States engaged in insurrection against the government of the United States, and it barely raises a single eyebrow, or a furrow on Susan Collins’s forehead.