I’m all for disqualifying him from office, but when Colorado did, it was judges who made the call. A Democrat Secretary of State doing it is going to give ammunition to all the partisans who claim the whole thing is political. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, only that it’s complicated.
This can of worms is open - every angle needs to be litigated. I’m not looking forward to random secretaries of state declaring eating tacos on the fourth of july to be insurrection.
Oh no, they might try to do something like an insurrection. They did that. Another insurrection? They have plans on the internet and a timeline.
But you’re worried about setting a precedent for the democracy that they laid out plans stating that they’re going to destroy and replace with a dictatorship? If they win. But if they lose, then they might have some sort of precedence in the democracy that still exists? Right? Because that’s what you’re saying. Think about what you’re saying.
Are you okay? Everything’s gonna be alright my dude.
They’re going to pretend they can declare whatever they don’t like an insurrection. The court cases will stabilize interpretation of the amendment, so I think the court cases surrounding this are going to be a good thing… I’m not sure where you were going with the rest of that.
From the article:
Bellows, a Democrat, issued the decision Thursday after presiding over an administrative hearing earlier this month about Trump’s eligibility for office. A bipartisan group of former state lawmakers filed the challenge against Trump.
IANA political scientist, but I read that as a bipartisan challenge was made, a hearing was held, and the Sec of State sided with the challengers, deciding to remove Trump from the ballot. It doesn’t appear to have just come out of nowhere or been initiated by her. That won’t stop others from arguing against it in bad faith, but there was a process at least, and it seems it’s within her duties to have made that decision. When it’s challenged by Trump (and it will be), then it will be up to a judge or judges to uphold or overturn.
I mean, that is the job of the Secretary of State office. They determine who or what is qualified for the ballot.
In my state, they kicked off one of the candidates for Governor in 2022 because he didn’t meet residency requirements.
He sued, it went through the courts, surprise! He wasn’t qualified due to residency requirements.
FTA:
"Among her reasons for deciding Kristof did not meet residency requirements, Scroggin cited his decision to vote as a New York resident in 2020 and his possession of a New York driver’s license in 2020. Both factors, she wrote, indicated Kristof “viewed New York as the place where you intended to permanently return when you were away.”
“In order to satisfy the three-year residency requirement, you must have been a resident in Oregon for the entire three-year period beginning in November 2019,” Scroggin wrote. “But the objective facts, including your decision to vote in New York, convincingly suggest that you resided in New York at least from November 2019 to December 2020.”"
Presumably there is a way to challenge this decision in court. And tbh I like this way of handling it better. Trump does not meet the basic requirements of being a president, which are:
- Must be over 35. ✔️
- Must be born in the USA. ✔️
- Must not be an insurrectionist. ❌
If a 32 year old was frontrunner to become the candidate for either party, you wouldn’t expect a court proceeding to disqualify them. Same here.
That’s what I thought was funny about the dissent one of the judges wrote in the Colorado case. They said something like, determining if someone is over 35 is easy, but determining if someone engaged in insurrection is not so easy. Which was weird to me, because the insurrection was broadcast live on TV and seemed pretty easy to determine to me. But I guess that’s why I’m not a judge.
Well ultimately, someone’s age is (generally) a pretty easily verifiable fact with little room for argument. Whether or not someone’s actions constitute an insurrection is not something you can read off a birth certificate - it relies on a subjective standard of what constitutes an insurrection. And given how many different forms that could take, I feel the 14th has to be as vague as a it is about what constitutes an insurrection. Jan 6 very obviously qualifies imo, but making a bulletproof legal argument to that effect is a whole other matter, especially considering how much scrutiny this decision will be under. Remember how wrapped in dog whistles this whole thing was - getting up on stage and vaguely suggesting to an angry mob to take their country back then going home and quietly muttering “nooo don’t break the law or hurt anyone pls go home nooooo” gives a very annoying level of rhetorical wiggle room to those responsible. It’s an intentional strategy to make this exact kind of argument as difficult as possible.
That on its own is no reason to not pursue invoking the 14th, because imo this is the exact situation in which it should be used, and it specifically does not require the same level of proof as in a criminal trial. But it is a significant complication we will be dealing with at all stages of this process and it remains to be seen how many are willing to stake their political careers on it.
Well, what is insurrection? What role did he play?
It’s like pornography, generally you know it when your see it, but the borders are very vague
I’d certainly classify what Trump did as an insurrection, but it’s not that simple. Where do you draw the line? It’s a complicated question
going to give ammunition to all the partisans who claim the whole thing is political.
Republicans are going to piss and moan and riot no matter what. We must not delay or suspend justice because we’re afraid of what they might do.
Not only will they piss and moan, but they have a clear cut script for whenever this happens. They claim the person or persons involved are “Biden-loving”, “ultra left radicals”, etc, etc. I’m 100% confident if the Trump campaign ever saw this thread, they would deem us all left wing plants working for Biden.
It is worth being strategic as we consider things.
GOP at least in Colorado has made it clear they will consider Trump no matter what, even if it means going to a private caucus. So these moves won’t keep him out of primaries, but may prevent independents from participating in the Republican primaries.
So this would be valuable only with respect to the general election. Colorado and Maine aren’t going to Trump anyway, so in those contexts it’s worthless.
On the other hand, it feeds the persecution complex. It ends up provoking a “we’ll show those Democrats by electing the guy they are trying to cheat out of his candidacy”.
If you can pull it off in any vaguely Republican voting state, might be worth it. However signs point to that not happening, so it looks like a bag strategy.
Which makes it more important for the Supreme Court to rule one way or the other instead of stalling. He has legally been found to be an insurrectionist, so until the Supreme Court says otherwise, any state that doesn’t allow traitors on ballots has a duty to the voters of their state to remove him.
I have a question. Can states legally remove Trump from ballots before he has been formally convicted of inciting an insurrection? Doesn’t this just give the GOP ammunition and the option to turn around and do the same thing and remove Biden from red state ballots?
So the courts did find that he participated in an insurrection. But they also ruled that he had presidential immunity, and any prosecution would require an impeachment and trial in the senate. Basically, the courts said they didn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute him for it. They went “lol yeah he definitely did it, but we can’t punish him for it.” And the republicans haven’t actually challenged this. After all, why would they? They control congress, so they simply won’t try him for it in the senate.
But the 14th amendment doesn’t require a conviction. It only requires a sworn official to have violated their oath of office. Which includes participating in an insurrection. It doesn’t require a conviction or even prosecution; It only requires violating your oath of office.
The 14th amendment was written in the wake of the civil war, with the union looking to prevent confederates from holding office. The union feared that the confederates would attempt to seize power through the elections, even after the war was over. But they knew that taking every individual confederate to court would take way too long. It would also run counter to the reunification efforts, because no confederates would agree to rejoin the union if they knew it meant they’d be criminally prosecuted. So instead, the union circumvented the courts and simply barred anyone who violated an oath of office.
Yes to the first and no to the second, its complicated… And I am NOT a lawyer, so take this the way you would any response attempting to be helpful from the internet.
They are removing him due to section 3 of the 14th ammendment, which does not require one to be convicted of anything, just that you violated your oath of office and/or participated in an insurrection/rebellion. It does not really specify the legal mechanism for how this is supposed to works other than that they cant hold office anymore.
The wording is done this way due to southern states sending confederate politicians to washington during reconstruction. President Grant loosened the restriction in 1898 for the Spanish-American war, and since then its only been dusted off once in the 1920s.
Source: I went to the 14th ammendments Wikipedia page.
As for the second question, in theory it shoulden’t give the GOP any ammo to turn around and do this to Biden. This is the reason its playing out slowly in the courts, the state AGs (just Colorado and Maine at this point) are waiting to see if that is a proper application of the ammendment. If the GOP did try turning around and doing this to Biden it would only take one federal judge to stop it. The supreme court could step in and clear this up quickly, but they appear to not want to be seen as a political body. So we wait.
The ruling from the original court was that Trump engaged in an insurrection (but enjoys presidential immunity). The presidential immunity bit was then appealed to the Colorado supreme court, who overturned that. That is how we have arrived at (a) he was in an insurrection and (b) he does not qualify to be on the ballot. Trump and is team have never contested (a), so as far as this case goes there is no question about whether he engaged in the insurrection.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Maine’s top election official has removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot, in a surprising decision based on the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”
The decision makes Maine the second state to disqualify Trump from office, after the Colorado Supreme Court handed down its own stunning ruling that removed him from the ballot earlier this month.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, issued the decision Thursday after presiding over an administrative hearing earlier this month about Trump’s eligibility for office.
“Democracy is sacred … I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all, and my duty under Maine’s election laws … is to ensure that candidates who appear on the primary ballot are qualified for the office they seek,” she said.
Explaining her reasoning, Bellows wrote that the challengers presented compelling evidence that the January 6 insurrection “occurred at the behest of” Trump – and that the US Constitution “does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government.”
The original article contains 480 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why Trump isn’t banned in all of the country’s ballot is beyond me.
