The Colorado Supreme Court, by a 4-3 majority, banned former President Donald Trump from the state’s Republican primaries, declaring him “ineligible” to run for president due to his direct involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, when hundreds of his supporters stormed Congress.
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Trump excluded from the 2024 primaries in Colorado
This is a historic fact. Tt is the first time that in the United States a candidate has been excluded by leveraging section 3 of the 14th amendment. According to which anyone involved in insurrections or revolts against the Constitution, after having sworn allegiance to it, cannot become president.
The Colorado decision could at this point be followed by other courts in several American states, given that dozens of lawsuits have been filed on the same legal bases.
The court also suspended the application of this decision until January 4. Or until the day on which the federal Supreme Court of the United States rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be resolved by January 5, the deadline for printing ballots for the Republican primary.
In the 2020 vote, Trump lost in Colorado by 13 points to Biden. According to analysts, he does not need to be a candidate in this state to win next year’s presidential elections. But aside from the general political damage, the danger for the former president is that more courts and election officials may follow the Colorado Supreme Court’s lead and exclude Trump from “must-win” states, those where it is mandatory to win.
The amendment was designed to prevent the leaders of the Confederate States from returning to government after the Civil War, which the North won. The rule was used very few times and only in the decade following the war.
The motivations
“The majority of the court – the judges wrote in the ruling – holds that President Trump cannot serve as president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.” “Since he is not legitimized – they continue – it would be a mistake to include him as a candidate in the presidential primaries”. “We – they underlined – have not reached these conclusions lightly. We are aware of the weight of the issues we are facing. However, we are aware of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favour, and without being influenced by public reaction to the decision we have reached”.
Similar cases have been thrown out in Minnesota and New Hampshire. In Michigan a judge ruled that the issue was “political” and not his to decide, while according to an appeals court Trump should not be removed from the race.
The reactions
Trump’s appeal to the federal Supreme Court was immediately announced, which will therefore be responsible for resolving the issue and establishing – at this point at a federal level – whether Trump is entitled to run for the role of president of the United States. The billionaire ex-president’s staff called the decision “wrong and undemocratic.“
On his social platform, Truth, Trump himself writes a polemical post which however does not make direct reference to the sentence: “It is a sad day for America when a notorious prosecutor like the deranged Jake Smith is put in the position of special prosecutor by Lisa Monaco and the other thugs surrounding our incompetent president, the corrupt Joe Biden, to sully my reputation with the goal of interfering in the election and, ideally, putting me in prison.” Prosecutor Smith is the one leading the investigations related to the assault on Congress by Trump supporters.
“We will fight for America like never before,” candidate Trump said to his supporters in the same hours, during a rally in Iowa: “It’s our final battle, with you at my side. We will drive out the globalists, the Marxists communists and fascists, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House and finish the job once and for all.”
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