The Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to hear former President Donald Trump's case for his right to be included on the Republican primary ballot, the Post Millennial reported. The plaintiffs had alleged Trump was involved in an "insurrection" and should be disqualified under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A lower court ruled last week that there is insufficient reason to bar Trump under the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies any candidate who engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" from running for office. Of all the charges piling up against Trump, no authority has formally charged him with either.
District Judge Sarah Wallace ruled in Trump's favor but maintained that his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots amounted to an insurrection. Wallace said that even so, the amendment did not apply to the presidency.
Wallace's ruling did not make either side happy. Trump's legal team criticized Wallace for several of her assertions, stating that she came to the "correct" conclusion with her ruling but that she "committed multiple grave jurisdictional and legal errors … creating new, unprecedented, and unsupported legal standards in applying" the law.
Fearing that Wallace laid the groundwork that could be used against Trump under "further review," his attorneys have appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. "The district judge rightly rejected the far-left’s efforts to keep President Trump off the ballot, but she then went out of her way to wrongly criticize the President," Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesman, said.
"We’ve asked the Colorado Supreme Court to strike her wrong-headed speculation because it goes far beyond her jurisdiction," he added. The plaintiffs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have also appealed to the higher court following Wallace's decision.
Attorney Sean Grimsley, representing the cohort of voters seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, said he was "hopeful" about having Wallce's decision overturned. While Grimsley agreed with Wallace's rationale, the "one issue" she "got wrong" was about whether it applied to the presidency.
"We’re going to pursue our claims in court. I think we put on a very good case; the judge issued a very detailed and thorough opinion – it took until page 95 of a 102-page opinion for her to rule against us on anything, so we’re just going to continue forward," Grimsley said.
"We’re going to go to the Colorado Supreme Court and see what happens there," he added. It seems Wallace may have been pinning her hopes on the case escalating, CNN reported.
Wallace contended that Trump "actively primed the anger of his extremist supporters" and that he "acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol. She further charged that he "engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021, through incitement and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech" in that instance.
The judge added that Trump "acted with the specific intent to disrupt the Electoral College certification of President Biden’s electoral victory through unlawful means." After all of this, Wallace lamented the fact that the 14th Amendment did not specifically apply to 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. 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," Wallace wrote in her ruling.
This is the third challenge from adversaries who want Trump thrown off of state ballots and the third time he's survived it. Judges in Michigan and Minnesota have similarly ruled Trump was eligible to remain on the GOP primary ballots in those states.
Leftists are horrified at the thought that Trump may prevail and take back the White House. They are using everything they can think of to stop him to no avail, but no doubt they'll keep trying.
