Colorado’s Supreme Court justices turned their skeptical eyes toward the case to keep former President Donald Trump off the state’s 2024 ballot Wednesday as they heard arguments over whether the Republican frontrunner’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, disqualified him from running again.
The seven justices peppered both the plaintiffs in a high-profile lawsuit and Trump’s legal team with questions that examined whether the siege of the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection. They also probed the legal ability of the Colorado secretary of state to keep candidates off the ballot, the language of the 14th Amendment itself — which says insurrectionists can’t run for office — as well as whether Colorado can invoke that rule on its own.
The provision at issue in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment was aimed at keeping Confederates away from federal power after the nation reunited. But its language doesn’t explicitly bar insurrectionists from the highest office in the land, prompting the Colorado justices to prod both sides about what that means.
“If it was so important that the president be included, I come back to the question: Why not spell it out?” Justice Carlos A. Samour Jr. asked the petitioners’ lawyers. “Why not include president and vice president in the way they spell out senator or representative?”
The attorneys had argued that it would be “bizarre” and “counterintuitive” to read the amendment as barring rebels from most federal offices while leaving the presidency open to them.
Trump’s legal team argued the presidency was excluded as a unique office on purpose. But would that mean, Justice Melissa Hart asked, that Jefferson Davis, the former president of the breakaway Confederacy, could have been elected U.S. president after the Civil War?
“That would be the rule of democracy at work,” replied Scott Gessler, a lead attorney for Trump and a former Colorado secretary of state.
The justices will sift through those answers and others in the weeks to come. They have no timeline to issue their ruling, though Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in January must certify the ballots for the state’s March 5 presidential primaries.
The court’s ruling could open the case up to a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, especially if the justices disqualify Trump. The Colorado ballot case is among several similar efforts targeting Trump across the country, but so far all have failed.
As it stands, Trump will be on Colorado’s Republican ballot. A Denver District Court judge ruled last month that Trump must be included because the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to presidents — though she also declared in the findings of fact that Trump engaged in insurrection back in January 2021.
That ruling prompted an appeal from both Trump’s legal team and the group of Republican and unaffiliated voters suing to keep him off the ballot.
Trump’s team agreed with Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s reading of the 14th Amendment but asked the state Supreme Court to strike the declaration that he engaged in insurrection. The petitioners, who are working with the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sought a broader ruling, arguing that an insurrectionist can’t be allowed to seek the Oval Office.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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