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      Colorado supreme court justices face death threats after Trump ruling

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      Justices on the Colorado supreme court are receiving a barrage of death threats after it ruled to exclude Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot next year because of his attempts to cause insurrection.A report compiled by Advance Democracy, a non-partisan non-profit organization, said there was “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats on social media, according to NBC News.Some of the worst of it was posted on fringe websites, including one post that said “behead judges” and “slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trash can”.Another post on The Donald, a pro-Trump forum where a Trump supporter once publicly bragged about his involvement with the January 6 insurrection and was arrested as a result, said “this ends when we kill these fuckers”.“The normalization of this type of violent rhetoric – and lack of remedial action by social media entities – is cause for significant concern,” Daniel J Jones, president of Advance Democracy, told NBC News.“Political leaders on both sides of the political aisle need to speak out against these calls for violence, and social media platforms need to reassess their role in hosting and promoting this rhetoric.”Advance Democracy noted that some violent posts are in direct response to Trump’s own furious posts about the ruling on Truth Social. Trump has called it “election interference” and implied it proves the 2020 election was stolen, the lie that eventually led to the January 6 insurrection.It isn’t the first time Trump’s posts and comments have incited threats against a court. A New York court reported last month that the office of the judge overseeing Trump’s fraud trial had been bombarded with death threats and antisemitic abuse, including some levied against the judge’s law clerk. The office received multiple threatening voicemails, including one that told the judge “you should be assassinated … you should be executed”. Another said: “We are coming to remove you permanently.”Trump’s lawyers in his fraud trial argued that the former president, who faces 91 criminal charges and is an adjudicated rapist, has no control over those who levy violent threats.Meanwhile, the court’s ruling has shaken Washington, with Republicans railing against the decision, Democrats defending the court’s ruling and legal scholars presenting a variety of views.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an unusual move, Dean Phillips, a Democratic representative from Minnesota who is running a long-shot campaign against Joe Biden, criticized the ruling on social media, making him one of the few Democrats disagreeing with the Colorado court.“Do I believe Trump is guilty of inspiring an insurrection and doing nothing to stop it? I was there. Absolutely. Do I believe it’s wrong to ban him from the ballot in Colorado without a conviction? Absolutely,” Phillips wrote on X. “Do I believe the SCOTUS must opine immediately? Absolutely.”Other Democrats have praised the ruling. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of Biden, called it “striking” and said it is “undeniable in my view that [Trump] participated in an insurrection and as such should be disqualified from holding federal office.” More

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      What Is the 14th Amendment, and How Could It Disqualify Trump in Colorado?

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      A ruling that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency will test the court’s methodological values.The ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court that former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president again because he engaged in an insurrection has cast a spotlight on the basis for the decision: the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which includes a clause disqualifying people who violated their oaths of office from holding government positions in the future.Mr. Trump has vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. It is dominated by a supermajority of six justices who emerged from the conservative legal movement, which values methods of interpretation known as textualism and originalism. Under those precepts, judges should interpret the Constitution based on its text and publicly understood meaning when adopted, over factors like evolving social values, political consequences or an assessment of the intended purpose of the provision.Some of the major questions raised by the ruling — like whether it would need an act of Congress to take effect as well as the power of a state court to decide whether a federal candidate is qualified — do not turn on interpreting the clause’s text. But here is where textualism and originalism may come into play.What is the disqualification clause?The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 as part of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. To deal with the problem of former Confederates holding positions of government power, its third section disqualifies former government officials who have betrayed their oaths from holding office.Specifically, the clause says that people are ineligible to hold any federal or state office if they took an oath to uphold the Constitution in one of various government roles, including as an “officer of the United States,” and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or aided its enemies. The clause also says a supermajority vote in Congress could waive such a penalty.According to a Congressional Research Service report, a criminal conviction was not seen as necessary: federal prosecutors brought civil actions to oust officials who were former Confederates, and Congress refused to seat certain members under the clause. Congress passed amnesty laws in 1872 and 1898, lifting the penalties on former Confederates.Is the president an ‘officer of the United States’?Mr. Trump is unique among American presidents: He has never held any other public office and only swore an oath to the Constitution as president. That raises the question of whether the disqualification clause covers the oath he took. While as a matter of ordinary speech, a president is clearly an “officer of the United States,” there is a dispute over whether it excludes presidents as a constitutional term of art.In 2021, two conservative legal scholars, Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law Houston and Seth Barrett Tillman of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, published a law review article about the clause arguing on textualist and originalist grounds that a president does not count as an officer of the United States. Among other issues, they focused on language about “officers” in the original Constitution as ratified in 1788 — including language about oaths that can be read as distinguishing appointed executive branch officers from presidents, who are elected.Last summer, two other conservative legal scholars — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — posted a law review article that invoked similar methodology but concluded that Mr. Trump is ineligible for the presidency. “Essentially all the evidence concerning the original textual meaning” of the clause pointed in that direction, the scholars argued. Among other things, they wrote that phrases like “officer of the United States” must be read “sensibly, naturally and in context, without artifice” that would render it a “‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings.”In an earlier phase of the Colorado case, a lower court judge had ruled that the clause does not cover presidents and so rejected removing Mr. Trump from the ballot. In finding the opposite, the Colorado Supreme Court also cited evidence of people in the immediate post-Civil War era discussing the president as an officer of the government, while focusing on ordinary use of the term rather than treating it as a term of art.Were the events of Jan. 6 an insurrection?The question of whether “insurrection” aptly describes the events of Jan. 6 is another topic of debate, although it was not a major disagreement among judges in Colorado.Some critics of Mr. Trump use that word to describe how a pro-Trump mob overran the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory. Mr. Trump’s allies — as well as some people who are otherwise his critics — argue that “insurrection” is hyperbole.The Constitution does not define the word. While it was written after the South’s armed rebellion against the Union, its text does not limit its scope to participation in events of a comparable scale. A federal statute allowing presidents to use troops to suppress insurrections discusses “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States” that “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”The Colorado Supreme Court’s four-justice majority found that the events were an insurrection, and that issue was not the basis of any of the three dissents. The lower-court judge who had rejected the lawsuit on the grounds that the president is not an “officer of the United States” had nevertheless found that the events of Jan. 6 constituted an insurrection.Has Trump ‘engaged’ in an insurrection?Even assuming the events of Jan. 6 were an insurrection, there remains the question of whether the actions of Mr. Trump — who did not himself storm Congress — amounted to engaging in an insurrection against the government or giving aid and comfort to its enemies.The House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election concluded that the events met the standard of an insurrection, and asked the Justice Department to consider charging him under a law that makes it a crime to incite, assist, or give “aid or comfort” to an insurrection.The panel cited his summoning of supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, the fiery speech he delivered to them as they morphed into a mob, how he refused for hours to take steps to call off the rioters despite being implored by aides to do so, and an inflammatory tweet he sent about Mr. Pence during the violence.Still, the special counsel, Jack Smith, did not include inciting an insurrection in the charges he brought against Mr. Trump, and to date Mr. Trump has not been convicted of any crime in connection with his attempts to stay in office for a second term despite losing the election. Mr. Trump has argued that all his actions were protected by the Constitution, including the First Amendment.What else have courts said about the clause and Jan. 6?There has never before been a presidential candidate who is accused in court of being an oath-breaking insurrectionist, so there is no Supreme Court precedent solidly on point. But other politicians have faced similar legal challenges in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021.In early 2022, opponents of Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Trump-aligned Republican of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit to keep him from running for re-election based on what they described as his role in encouraging what became the Jan. 6 riot. A Federal District Court judge dismissed the case, ruling that the clause no longer had force after the 1872 amnesty law. But an appeals court overturned that ruling, holding that the amnesty law was only retrospective and the prohibition still applied in general. Mr. Cawthorn lost his primary election, so the case was rendered moot without resolving other issues.Opponents of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-aligned Republican of Georgia, similarly tried to keep her from running for re-election in 2022. A state judge rejected that challenge, finding no persuasive evidence that she “took any action — direct physical efforts, contribution of personal services or capital, issuance of directives or marching orders, transmissions of intelligence, or even statements of encouragement — in furtherance” of what turned into the Jan. 6 riot after she first took the oath on Jan. 3, 2021.And in September 2022, a state judge in New Mexico ordered Couy Griffin, a commissioner in New Mexico’s Otero County, removed from office under the clause. Mr. Griffin had been convicted of trespassing for breaching the Capitol as part of the mob. The judge ruled that the events surrounding the Jan. 6 riot counted as an insurrection and that Mr. Griffin’s role in the matter rendered him “constitutionally disqualified from serving.” More

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      Colorado Supreme Court Was Narrowly Split on Barring Trump From Ballot

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      The 4-3 decision was harshly criticized by Trump supporters, who called it undemocratic. But some observers say the court is notably nonpartisan. The Colorado Supreme Court, which barred former President Donald J. Trump from the state’s primary ballot, is composed of seven justices who were all appointed by Democratic governors.Justices on the court serve 10-year terms, and Democrats have held the governor’s office for the last 16 years, so all of the current justices were appointed by that party, with five appointed by one man: John Hickenlooper, who was governor from 2011 to 2019 and is now one of the state’s U.S. senators.Still, the chief justice, Brian Boatright, is a Republican, while three justices are Democrats and three are listed in voter registration records as “unaffiliated” with a party. And the court was not of one mind on whether Mr. Trump should appear on the ballot. The decision was 4-3, with the court ruling that the 14th Amendment forbade Mr. Trump from holding office because he had “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters overran the Capitol. (Of the four who voted with the majority, two are registered Democrats and two are not registered with a party.)The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic. The head of Colorado’s Republican Party, Dave Williams, said “out-of-control radicals” in Colorado “would rather spit on our Constitution than let the people decide which candidates should represent them in a free and fair election.”But some observers of the court say that it is notably nonpartisan, in part because of how the justices are named. The governor must choose from a pool of nominees recommended by a bipartisan commission. The majority of the members on that commission are not lawyers. Still, most are chosen by the governor.The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic.Max Whittaker for The New York Times“It’s perceived to be way less political than the U.S. Supreme Court, and I think it’s true that it’s way less political,” said Chris Jackson, a lawyer in Denver whose practice includes election law. “There aren’t really conservative and liberal justices in the way that we describe the U.S. Supreme Court justices.”The decision on Trump on Tuesday was not the first time the court has removed a political candidate from the ballot. In 2020, it ruled that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Michelle Ferrigno Warren, could not appear on the primary ballot because she had not collected enough signatures from voters. A lower court had been more lenient, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, but the state’s highest court disagreed.Two years earlier, in 2018, the court removed a Republican candidate from a ballot. It found that Representative Doug Lamborn, a longtime congressman from Colorado Springs, had not collected enough valid voter signatures to be on the ballot. In that case, however, a federal court disagreed and eventually reinstated Mr. Lamborn, who won the election.Mr. Lamborn said in a statement that he hoped Mr. Trump would have similar success in the U.S. Supreme Court.Brian Boatright, the chief justice, in December. Pool photo by David Zalubowski“This wrongful decision was made by the same court that unconstitutionally removed my name from the ballot years ago & had to be corrected by a federal court,” Mr. Lamborn wrote on the social media platform X. Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court can choose whether to hear cases that are appealed to it, and, in some of the state’s biggest recent cases, the Colorado high court has declined. That was true in two cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighed in: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which that court sided in 2018 with a baker who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and a case this year, Counterman v. Colorado, in which the high court said that the First Amendment put limits on laws banning online threats.Doug Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said the state’s high court appeared, in its Trump decision, to try to walk a tight line. It had ruled to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot but put a pause on its own ruling. If the case is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, as is expected, then Mr. Trump’s name would, under the state court’s order, remain on the ballot until the Supreme Court decides the case. But the Colorado secretary of state said on Tuesday that she would follow whatever court order is in place on Jan. 5, when the state must certify ballots for the primary election.In staying its own decision until the Supreme Court weighs in, Professor Spencer said, the state court had “teed it up in just the right way” to be decided by the nation’s top court.He added: “They’re very thorough in terms of explaining themselves, whether or not you agree with them.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      in Elections

      With Trump Declared an ‘Insurrectionist,’ His Rivals Pull Their Punches, Again

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      The blockbuster ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court would seem to give Donald Trump’s challengers an avenue of attack, but far behind in the polls, they are skirting the issue.A state high court’s decision that the Republican front-runner for the White House is disqualified from office might seem like a pretty good opening for his ostensible G.O.P. challengers.But in an era of smashmouth politics, ushered in by former President Donald J. Trump, only Mr. Trump appears capable of smashing anyone in the mouth. So, with under four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday — that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the state’s primary ballot under a section of the 14th Amendment that holds that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” — was apparently off limits.Mr. Trump still seems to be the one setting the parameters for legitimate debate in the G.O.P., even if he doesn’t participate in the party’s actual debates.“We don’t need to have judges making these decisions,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is rising in the polls but still far behind Mr. Trump, told reporters in Agency, Iowa, on Tuesday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida not only refrained from attacking his chief rival, but he also spun out a conspiracy theory to suggest the ruling was a plot against him to aid Mr. Trump.“What the left and the media and the Democrats are doing — they’re doing all this stuff, to basically solidify support in the primary for him, get him into the general, and the whole general election is going to be all this legal stuff,” Mr. DeSantis said on Wednesday, speaking at the Westside Conservative Club Breakfast in Iowa.At a restaurant outside Des Moines, he asked reporters, “We’re going to be litigating this stuff for how many more years going forward? I think we’ve got to start focusing on the people’s issues.”Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has clung most tightly to Mr. Trump’s pant legs throughout the primary season, went so far as to pledge solidarity and withdraw his own name from the Colorado ballot, and he demanded the other candidates follow suit. A biotech financier who has spent millions of his own dollars on his campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy railed against “the unelected elite class in the back of palace halls” as he sat in the back of his well-appointed campaign bus.Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose long-shot run for the Republican nomination has centered on questioning the front-runner’s fitness for office, demurred, engaging not on the Colorado justices’ conclusions but their timing.“I don’t think a court should exclude somebody from running for president without there being a trial and evidence that’s accepted by a jury that they did participate in insurrection,” he said on Tuesday night during a town hall event in New Hampshire.The heart of the Republican primary season is now just weeks away: Voters in Iowa will caucus on Jan. 15, with the first primary of the year, New Hampshire’s, coming Jan. 23. If anything, the former president’s lead seems only to grow. He clobbers his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, in a new New York Times/Siena College poll, drawing 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide.Yet his rivals remain apparently unwilling to take any real risks that could shake the dynamic. Republican primary voters have overwhelmingly decided that each new legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s actions to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, each ruling in cases involving the way he has conducted business, treated women or handled classified material — all of it is simply not relevant to their votes.More than one in five Republican voters think Mr. Trump has committed crimes, and 13 percent of Republicans believe that he should be found guilty in court of trying to overturn the 2020 election, yet most of those voters also say they would still cast their ballots for him.So, his rivals figure, why dwell on it?“I guess that state has that right to remove Trump from the ballot if they feel like it,” Tim Robbins, 72, a farmer and Iowa Republican, said of the Colorado ruling after an appearance by Ms. Haley. “But I think the people need to decide. It’s the people’s decision, not the state’s decision.”He added that he agreed with Ms. Haley’s hands-off approach: “I don’t need somebody to tell me what to think of somebody else,” he said. “I’ll draw my own conclusions.”It seemed on Wednesday that only two people in the race for the White House wanted to talk about the Colorado ruling: Mr. Trump, who sent fund-raising appeals in emails with the subject lines “BALLOT REMOVAL” and “REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT,” and President Biden, who said Mr. Trump “certainly supported an insurrection.”“You saw it all,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision.”There is no evidence suggesting that Mr. Biden has any ties to the Colorado case, or that he has meddled in any of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump. But on his social media network, Mr. Trump was spinning the story that has either paralyzed his rivals for the nomination or elicited hosannas from the competition.“BIDEN SHOULD DROP ALL OF THESE FAKE POLITICAL INDICTMENTS AGAINST ME, BOTH CRIMINAL & CIVIL,” he wrote. “EVERY CASE I AM FIGHTING IS THE WORK OF THE DOJ & WHITE HOUSE.”Michael Gold More

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      Trump’s Ballot Eligibility Faces Challenges in These Other States, Too

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      At least 16 states beyond Colorado currently have open legal challenges to the former president’s eligibility for office — but what happens next depends on the U.S. Supreme Court.This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to disqualify former President Donald J. Trump from holding office again was the first victory for a sprawling legal effort that is still unfolding across the country.At least 16 other states currently have pending legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility for office under the 14th Amendment, according to a database maintained by Lawfare, a nonpartisan site dedicated to national security issues. The lawsuits argue that he is barred because he engaged in an insurrection with his actions surrounding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Four of these lawsuits — in Michigan, Oregon, New Jersey and Wisconsin — have been filed in state courts. Eleven lawsuits — in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New York, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming — have been filed in federal district courts.Cases in two of these states, Arizona and Michigan, were initially dismissed by a lower court but have been appealed. Another challenge has also been made in Maine.The Trump campaign has said it will appeal the ruling in Colorado, in which the State Supreme Court said it would put its decision on hold — meaning that it is not in effect — until Jan. 4, in hopes of receiving guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court.“We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory, and that this case presents several issues of first impression,” the Colorado justices wrote, noting that their decision could change based on “the receipt of any order or mandate from the Supreme Court.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Biden says it’s ‘self-evident’ that Trump is an insurrectionist

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      Joe Biden has said it is “self-evident” that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist in his first public comments since Colorado’s supreme court removed the former president from the state’s 2024 ballot.The president was speaking before boarding Air Force One to an afternoon engagement in Milwaukee, and said he would not comment on the legal premise cited by the Colorado panel for its majority decision, or the likely intervention of the US supreme court.“Whether the 14th amendment applies or not, we’ll let the court make that decision,” the president said.But he was more forthright when asked directly if he thought Trump was an insurrectionist.“I think it’s self-evident … he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero. And he seems to be doubling down on it, about everything,” he said.Biden has mostly remained silent about the legal troubles that Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, is facing.The president has long been critical of Trump’s conduct surrounding the events of 6 January 2021, when the outgoing president incited a mob of his supporters to overrun the US Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.Trump was, Biden said at the time, “singularly responsible” for the violence of the deadly riot, in which several people lost their lives, including law enforcement officers and protestors.Among Trump’s legal cases is one in Washington DC, in which he has pleaded not guilty to four criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The supreme court is poised to soon hear an appeal that could affect the trial.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, backed Biden’s comments during a lunchtime appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The big picture, no matter if Donald Trump ends up being on the ballot or off the ballot, is the extent of how dangerous he is to American democracy,” she said.“He tried to steal the presidency from the American people. He incited an insurrection with folks ramming into the US Capitol, some of whom had plans to hang the vice-president, and then he did not stop there. He spent months trying to undermine the peaceful process, the peaceful transfer of the presidency.” More

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      Trump lashes out after Colorado ruling removing him from ballot

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      The Colorado supreme court ruling on Tuesday that bars Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot has kicked off a firestorm among Republicans and legal scholars, and fury from Trump himself.Though the former president did not address the decision during a rally on Tuesday night in Iowa – where he went on abusive rants against immigration – he posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday. “What a shame for our country!!!” Trump wrote. “A sad day for America!!!”Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which brought the suit in Colorado on behalf of Republican and independent voters, praised the decision. It was, he said, “not only historic and justified, but is also necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.“Our constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government,” he said.Republicans have largely lined up behind Trump, railing against the ruling for allegedly infringing the right of Americans to choose their leaders.Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York, said in a statement: “Democrats are so afraid that President Trump will win on Nov 5th 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot.”The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to drop out of the Republican primary in Colorado, piling pressure on his fellow candidates to do the same or be seen as “tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences from our country”.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is also campaigning for the Republican nomination, voiced an unusual theory that the Colorado decision was in fact a move from Democrats to incite Trump’s base and deliberately help him win the primary.“They’re doing all this stuff to basically solidify support in the primary for him, get him into the general, and the whole general election’s going to be all this legal stuff,” DeSantis said on Wednesday, according to NBC News. “It will give [Joe] Biden or the Democrat, whoever, the ability to skate through this thing.”Over the last few months, Trump has been liberally using his 91 criminal charges and assorted civil trials to further the narrative that Washington is against him, calling on his base for financial support. Trump has already seized on the Colorado ruling for fundraising purposes, posting on Truth Social, “Breaking news: Colorado just removed me from the ballot! Chip in now.”The Colorado court postponed the implementation of its ruling until 4 January, giving room for Trump to make an appeal to the US supreme court. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said on Tuesday night that the campaign has “full confidence that the US supreme court will quickly rule in our favor and finally put an end to these un-American lawsuits”.Despite confidence from Trump’s team that the supreme court would rule in their favor, legal reactions to the Colorado ruling have so far shown just how murky the debate will be.Trump’s Truth Social feed is already reflecting this. On Tuesday night, Trump quoted Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor at George Washington University who has appeared as a witness for House Republicans seeking to impeach Biden over nebulous claims of corruption.“This country is a powder keg and this court is just throwing matches at it … for people that say they are trying to protect democracy, this is hands down the most anti-democratic opinion I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Trump quoted Turley as saying on Fox News.But Trump truncated a portion of Turley’s interview where he said that though he believed the Colorado court was wrong, “January 6 was many things, most of it not good”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In my view, it was not an insurrection. It was a riot,” Turley said. “That doesn’t mean that the people responsible for that day shouldn’t be held accountable. But to call this an insurrection for the purposes of disqualification would create a slippery slope for every state in the union.”The Colorado court ruled that section 3 of the 14th amendment disqualifies Trump from office because the section – referred to as the insurrection clause – bars anyone from holding political office if they took an oath to uphold the constitution but “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it. The section was included in the constitution after the civil war to prevent Confederate leaders from holding office in the government they had rebelled against.Turley’s argument is that while Trump incited a riot, it technically does not amount to the insurrection specified in the 14th amendment.“If you dislike Trump, you believe he’s responsible for January 6 … this isn’t the way to do it,” he said.This is just one of the points that will be debated if Trump’s appeal is taken up by the supreme court, which has been facing an onslaught of accusations of politics in the court. As much as the Colorado ruling puts a spotlight on Trump, it will also set up the US supreme court – which has historically tried to maintain itself as a neutral arbiter of the law – to take on yet another case entrenched in politics.Trump appointed three out of the court’s nine current justices, cementing a six-to-three conservative majority in the court that has overturned abortion and affirmative action in the last three years. The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has also been facing criticism over the last year for taking gifts and vacations from billionaires, as well as for the conservative activism of his wife, Ginni Thomas.The court is also set to rule on another Trump appeal, which will decide whether he is immune from prosecution over any charges that come from his Washington DC criminal trial over the January 6 insurrection.Regardless of whether the Colorado ruling is upheld, the debate will probably force close scrutiny of Trump’s involvement in the January 6 attack. Trump maintains that the more than 1,000 people who were arrested after the attack, including 600 who were eventually sentenced, are political prisoners. He also continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen, a belief that incited those who carried out the January 6 attack in the first place.“Election interference!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday night. More

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      Banned in Colorado? Bring it on – in the twisted logic of Donald Trump, disqualification is no bad thing at all | Emma Brockes

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      Ten days out from the end of the year, and who could have foreseen the latest Trump plot twist? On Wednesday morning, Americans woke to absorb the fallout from the previous day’s news that Colorado – of all places – had ruled via its supreme court to ban Donald Trump from the ballot in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. There are many sober things to say about this, but in the first instance let’s give way to an unseemly squeal. How completely thrilling!Colorado leans Democrat – both its senators are blue – but it’s a western state with large conservative enclaves that is not exactly Massachusetts or Vermont. The decision by the state’s top justices is unprecedented in US electoral history. According to their ruling, Trump is in breach of section 3 of the 14th amendment, the so-called “insurrectionist ban”, in light of his behaviour during the 6 January storming of the Capitol.“President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection,” the judges said in a statement. “Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully under way, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice-President [Mike] Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.”Well, it could hardly be less ambiguous. The 14th amendment, adopted in the wake of the civil war to obstruct Confederate lawmakers from returning to Congress, has never been implemented in a presidential race and, of course, Trump’s lawyers immediately challenged it. The ban will swiftly go up to the US supreme court for judgment, until which time Trump’s candidacy in Colorado will remain legitimate.Given the conservative super-majority of the US’s highest court, we have to assume that Colorado’s challenge will be unsuccessful. It might also be assumed that, catching on, other states will follow Colorado’s lead and vote similarly to exclude Trump from the primaries. Apart from childish delight, what, then, might this week’s events achieve?The wider backdrop isn’t encouraging, and glancing at the polls this week is a quick way to shunt the smirk from your face. In a survey commissioned by the New York Times on Tuesday, US voters were found to be largely unhappy with President Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which he scored a 57% disapproval rating. Given how divided Democrats are over fighting in the Middle East, that figure isn’t surprising. What, to use the technical term, blows your mind is that in the same poll, 46% of voters expressed the opinion that Trump would be making a better job of it than Biden, with only 38% more inclined to trust the president. Overall, Trump leads Biden by two points in the election race, a slender margin but, given the 91 felony counts currently pending against Trump, a hugely depressing one.Trump doesn’t need Colorado to win. In the 2020 election, he lost the state by 13 percentage points. And there is a good chance that, following the Alice in Wonderland logic that seems to determine Trump’s fortunes, the ruling in Colorado might actually help him. The narrative Trump has crafted for himself of being a Zorro-type outsider pursued by deep state special interests is as absurd as it is apparently compelling to large numbers of his supporters. At a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday night, Trump avoided the subject of Colorado’s decision, which came in just before he stepped out on stage. That won’t hold. By the end of the evening, an email sent out by his campaign team had already referred to the ban as a “tyrannical ruling”.And so we find ourselves in the perfect catch-22. The greater Trump’s transgressions and the more severe the censure from his detractors, the more entrenched his popularity with Republican voters appears to grow. It may not win him the presidency next November – there are too many variables around undecided voters in the middle – but it seems increasingly likely that it will ensure he beats his Republican rivals to get on the ballot.A four-count indictment for election interference, brought by special counsel Jack Smith and covering Trump’s actions in the run-up to 6 January, is set to be heard in the District of Columbia in March. Countless other civil and criminal suits work their way through the system. And now his viability as a candidate will probably go before the supreme court. It’s like a grim parlour game, with the same question going round and round: what will it take to make any of this stick?
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More