After Colorado’s highest court ruled that former President Donald Trump couldn’t run in the state’s Republican primary, the Colorado Republican Party officially asked the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved on Wednesday. A spokesman for the Republican group told us about this development.
The appeal comes from a decision made by the Colorado Supreme Court on December 19. The court said that Trump should not be able to run because he was involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by people who supported him. The court said that Trump couldn’t be president because of a part of the Constitution that says people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” are not allowed to hold public office.
Justice for the Colorado Republican Party in this case is being handled by Jay Sekulow, who works for the American Center for Law & Justice, a conservative law company. Trump, who is currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, is likely to send his own appeal. The state’s highest court put off making a decision until January 4, which meant that Trump would stay on the ticket while he filed an appeal.
It is important to note that the Colorado court’s decision was the first time that Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which is often called the “disqualification clause,” had been used to rule that a presidential candidate was not qualified to run for office. A judge in a lower court had said that Trump may have incited violence, but that did not make him a “officer of the United States” who could be removed from office under the Fourteenth Amendment while he was president. The 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that decision.
The state court said that Trump’s actions in stirring up violence at the Capitol, where lawmakers were meeting to confirm the results of the 2020 election, were the same as rebellion. The court said that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “insurrection” clause applies to the president. People thought that Trump’s supporters were trying to get rid of evidence that he lost the 2020 election to Democratic Vice President Joe Biden. However, multiple judges have disproved this claim.
Despite legal challenges in some states that tried to keep Trump from being on primary ballots, courts in other places have thrown out these attempts. For example, Minnesota’s highest court did not rule that Trump could not run in the Republican primary there, but it also did not rule that he was ineligible to be president in general.