About a month after the Jan. 6 attack, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, reminded the political world that if Donald Trump ran for a second term, the Republican might run into eligibility problems. After all, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars any public official who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The Maryland Democrat explained at the time, “Donald Trump is right in, you know, the bullseye middle of that group,” referencing how the lawmakers at the end of the Civil War intended for it to be used. “And so, he really does fulfill exactly the constitutional prohibition there.”
The former president was dismissive of the argument, characterizing it as a “trick.” As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, a majority of the Colorado Supreme Court came to a very different conclusion.
The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday said Donald Trump is disqualified from holding the office of the presidency under the U.S. Constitution. … Because he’s disqualified, the state Supreme Court said in its 4-3 decision spanning 133 pages, it would be a “wrongful act” to list Trump as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. Therefore, the court said, he can’t be on the ballot or have write-in votes for him counted.
In case this isn’t obvious, this is the first such ruling against a leading major-party presidential candidate. Of course, Trump’s role in attacking his own country’s democracy in the wake of his election defeat was historically unique, too.
The Colorado Supreme Court was not the first state court to consider the underlying legal question. Related lawsuits have been filed in dozens of states, to no avail: NBC News reported overnight that courts “have ruled against similar efforts to get Trump banned from the ballot in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota.”
In each of these…
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