The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, just three years after the end of the American Civil War, was intended not only to guarantee the civil rights of former slaves but also to prevent former high-ranking Confederate officials from return to their country. power as members of Congress, regaining control of a government they had rebelled against during the 2024 presidential election, thanks to his actions during the 2020 election.
The decision – which the former president’s legal team has already announced it will appeal to the US Supreme Court – stipulates that Trump’s name will not appear on the Republican primary ballot in that state, but could ultimately leave him out of the presidential race .
By a majority of four of the seven justices, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the November first-instance decision, concluding that Trump was involved in a riot during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ruling that the 14th Amendment to the constitution, which is invoked to claim his unfitness, de facto applies to a president.
For now, however, the decision has been put on hold until January 4, the deadline for certification of ballots in Colorado, in case an appeal is filed to the Federal Supreme Court by then. “If an appeal is filed to the Supreme Court before this stay expires, it will remain in effect and Trump’s name must still appear on the 2024 primary ballot until he receives an order or mandate from the Supreme Court,” the decision reads.
But what is the impact of this decision?
Colorado, a state that voted Democratic in the most recent presidential election in 2020, gave Biden a victory with a more than 13-point lead over Trump. Moreover, the primaries are scheduled for March 5, the super Tuesday in which another dozen states vote and everything indicates that the millionaire, a hyper favorite in the Republican race, will easily secure the nomination without needing Colorado.
But this is still a historic decision. On the one hand, Colorado’s decision to ban Trump from mail-in ballots could open the door for other states to do the same. But on the other hand, this new legal setback could ultimately fuel the former president’s narrative that he is being targeted. Even Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and one of his fiercest critics among the candidates for the Republican nomination, ultimately criticized the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. “I do not believe that Donald Trump should be prevented by a court from becoming President of the United States. “I believe that the voters of this country should prevent him from becoming President of the United States… I think it is good for our country that he be removed from the record by a court,” he said.
And if, as I remembered yesterday, The Washington PostRepublican voices were quicker to criticize this court decision than Democratic voices to welcome it, revealing “some discomfort with this method of defeating Trump.” There is also nothing to indicate that there is an imitation effect in other states. After all, of the seven justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, all appointed by Democratic governors, three disagreed with the decision. And a Monmouth University poll found that seven in 10 Republicans don’t think it’s appropriate to use the word “insurrection” to describe what happened in Congress on January 6, 2021.
That day, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington to try to prevent the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory. On August 1, the former president was accused of conspiring to overturn the election results, an accusation that was repeated by the state of Georgia on the 14th of the same month. Numerous appeals from the former president’s team followed, but of the more than 15 lawsuits currently underway in several states, two of which were dismissed in Minnesota and Michigan, Colorado was the first to declare Trump unfit.
Less than eleven months before the next presidential election, the campaign promises to heat up. And Trump didn’t mince his words. “What a shame for our country!!! A sad day for America,” he wrote on his social network Truth Social after the decision became known. The day before, at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, he repeated the accusations he had made against immigrants, guaranteeing that “they are destroying the blood of our country,” but he rejected citing Hitler. ‘I’ve never read before my camp“, he claimed.
Source: DN
