The decision represents a partial but critically significant reversal of a Colorado District Court decision which was issued on November 17, 2023.
In that case, the question at hand was whether Donald Trump should be barred from holding elected office again. The grounds for that came from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly bars former government officials who had sworn an oath to support the Constitution and later were involved in an insurrection against the Constitution from any chance of becoming an elected official anytime in the future.
That section of the Amendment, which was ratified on July 9, 1868, was crafted with a principal objective of preventing former Confederate government officials and officers from being elected to public office, on the grounds that they had conspired to breach the U.S. Constitution and secede.
In the November 17 ruling, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace sided with the plaintiffs in the case in agreeing that Donald Trump had indeed “engaged in insurrection” against the Constitution by encouraging the disruption of the counting of electoral ballots and the support of the Capitol riot, among other things.
But where she diverged from the wishes of the plaintiffs was whether that rendered Donald Trump ineligible for inclusion on the ballot. She argued that it did not, and for an unexpected reason.
Her reading of what the 14th Amendment covered was that those involved in an insurrection against the Constitution would have to have sworn to “support” the Constitution. But as has been noted in other cases, the president of the United States is the sole federal officer at a senior level who swears instead to an oath just to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. So, Judge Wallace concluded, since Trump never agreed to “support” the Constitution, he could not be deemed in violation of the 14th Amendment bar for future office for those who violated their pledge to support it. Instead, she wrote in her decision then, “it appears to the court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath.”
Wallace was wrong.
The 35 word oath is found in Article II of the Constitution and reads:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
While the difference in wording between the two oaths sworn to by the president and other federal officers is only slightly different, it still includes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Interfering with the voting process and inciting an insurrection, no matter how poorly orchestrated, is indeed a violation of that oath.
The case was immediately appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. It heard the case earlier this month on an expedited basis. The ruling which came down yesterday supported every element of the District Court decision except one. It said that Trump, by supporting the insurrection against the Constitution, had violated the terms of the 14th amendment as was therefore ineligible to run for office.
“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the Colorado Supreme court decision explains. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
Colorado is currently scheduled to hold its Republican Presidential Primary Election on March 5. That is the same day as multiple other states are also voting on the Republican candidate for president, in an event often referred to as “Super Tuesday”.
The Colorado Supreme Court has stayed its own ruling from going into effect until January 4, 2024. That is to allow the losing side to file appeals in the case. If as expected those are filed, they will be referred to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final decision. If the U.S. Supreme Court does agree to hear the case, the decision will remain stayed until they rule.
Though the Colorado high court ruling is stayed at this point, it is expected to influence the escalation of a similar case in Michigan which was filed to bar Trump from being on the state ballot there. In Michigan the lower court blocked an attempt to bar Trump from running, without even reaching a finding that he had been involved in an insurrection. That case has been appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court and is expected to be ruled on soon.
While the U.S. Supreme Court likely has little choice but to listen to and rule on this case, any decision it will make will likely polarize the nation even further than it already is regarding Donald Trump’s seemingly undisputed role in attempting to undermine the normal transfer of power from a current president to a just elected one.
An indication of how that may play out is already happening now, only hours after the Colorado Supreme Court decision was passed down.
In the House of Representatives, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the decision as “nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack” and that the Supreme Court “will set aside this reckless decision”.
In the Senate, Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, has already introduced a special three-page bill to deal with the damage he says the Colorado Supreme Court has already caused. His bill, if passed, would amend the Help America Vote Act to prevent “misusing the Fourteenth Amendment for political purposes”. Considering that the whole idea of the 14th amendment was political in the first place (though on very different grounds than most “political” legislation), getting this one passed could be an interesting fight.
With just days before the Christmas holiday shutdown for Congress and the Supreme Court already having left the building into 2024, expect little more than the Supreme Court acknowledging they will hear the case promptly in early January.
Publisher's Commentary
Trump was right that there were numerous voting irregularities in 2020 and that Democrats did engage in a certain amount of vote-fraud. The entire electronic voting system is vulnerable to manipulation, the voter roles in many states hadn't been cleaned in decades and contained voters dead or moved to another state and video evidence proves that there was widespread ballot box stuffing with fraudulent absentee ballots in at least some states. The 2020 Presidential election was a mess and the outcome may have indeed been a fraud. But, Trump engaged in his own manipulation of the vote and would have stolen the election if he could.
When Trump encouraged his supporters to stop the theft of the election he was inciting an insurrection, but he was also setting up well-meaning patriots who might someday be able to successfully support such a justified insurrection to be identified and neutralized. Most of them are now sitting in prison with long sentences for being present at the Capitol building while everyone else who traveled to Washington DC just before January 6 is on a list for investigation. The large number of federal agents posing as protesters and inciting violence proves that the well-meaning Trump supporters were being setup by the Trump administration.
America's political system is fatally broken. Both the Demoncrats and Rebugnicons are disgusting criminal organizations.
The United States of America was never a Democracy and is no longer a Republic, it has been an oligarchy puppet show for a very long time. It is so broken that it can't be fixed and the entire political system must be replaced with something better. But it is probably too late for that.
It is possible to see the future with some degree of accuracy. A remote viewing project led by scientist Stephen Schwartz has been doing just that. His team of future viewers has successfully predicted many major events and for 2050 they predict that the U.S. federal government no longer exists and that government will only exist to a lesser degree at the state and local levels.
However, the future is not set in stone and Americans could awaken, band together and create a new form of government that is based on direct democracy instead of fail-by-design representative democracy.