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      Underdog contender for Democratic nomination says Biden ‘cannot win’ against Trump

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      Democratic congressman Dean Phillips, who is challenging incumbent president Joe Biden, will keep running his long-shot bid for the White House through the summer after he’s had more time to introduce himself to voters across the US.Phillips initially planned to run in a few states for his party’s presidential nomination, focusing especially on the crucial early-voting state of New Hampshire, which was seen as a trial balloon for his candidacy. But now, Phillips told the Guardian in an interview, he is aiming for a much longer campaign.By the summer, Phillips wants to compare head-to-head polling between him and former President Donald Trump, and Trump and Biden. If Biden fares better in the matchup, Phillips would support him. If Phillips fares better, he believes Biden should throw his support toward the congressman.“Those are my intentions, and I think those should be the intentions of every Democrat. Let’s find the candidate best positioned and most likely to win,” Phillips said.Phillips’ bullishness about his odds – and his strong belief that Biden will not win against Trump again – have kept his campaign in motion. The congressman, buoyed up by a personal fortune from his family’s distilling company and a gelato brand, hasn’t been deterred by the Democratic machine backing Biden. So far, Phillips has been his own main supporter, injecting $4m into his own campaign.As the New Hampshire primary nears next month, Phillips is feeling good about his chances there. Biden isn’t on the ballot in the state because national Democrats altered their calendar to put more diverse states earlier in the primary process, though the president’s supporters will mount a write-in campaign. That gives Phillips a leg up.The state offers the “lowest cost, highest probability opportunity to surprise people and to demonstrate my campaign”, he said.Since Phillips launched his campaign in October, after months of trying to goad more prominent Democrats to challenge the sitting president, he’s been met with a chorus of simple questions about who he is and why he’s doing this.His answer is simple: “Because Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump.”Phillips’ presence in the race doesn’t really change that fact at this point – polls in New Hampshire show him far behind Biden. Recent polls back up his assertion, though, that the Democratic president isn’t going into the election year strong. Neither Biden nor Trump are well liked by the electorate, despite the seeming inevitability of the repeat matchup.“You can’t win a national election with 33% approval numbers,” Phillips said, referring to a recent Pew Research Center survey on Biden’s job rating. “And I don’t understand why I’m the only one out of 250-some Democrats in Congress to simply say the quiet part out loud: he cannot win the next election.”On policy, the two Democrats don’t widely differ. Phillips’ campaign isn’t an insurgent progressive campaign designed to move the centrist president further left. The main difference is a visual one – Phillips is much younger than Biden and Trump. He’s called for a new generation to lead the country forward.In that sense, though, his campaign draws attention to one of Biden’s weakest points, though Phillips argues the age differences are “pretty obvious” and not something he’s actively pointed out. “Neither of us can change our ages or stages of life.”By running a campaign against Biden, some Democrats fear Phillips is emphasizing the president’s flaws during a vulnerable time, ultimately further hurting Democrats’ ability to beat Trump in 2024. Phillips finds this notion “absurd”, saying that his presence should help Biden if it gets the president to come out and campaign or debate, to show himself to the voters more.While Biden’s poor polling animated Phillips’ campaign, the congressman has worked to fill in some of the details about who he’d be as a president. His political career has been short: three terms in Congress after flipping a longtime GOP seat in suburban Minnesota. He’s keen on pragmatic, bipartisan politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs of now, the economy and affordability have risen as a primary focus for him, with plans to address the rising costs of healthcare, housing, education and daily expenses forthcoming, he said.He’s also changed his mind on one big issue after hearing “such horrifying, heartbreaking stories” from people since taking office: he now supports Medicare for All, as opposed to just a public option. He thinks it’s an issue on which Republicans and Democrats could work together.On the Israel-Hamas war, perhaps Biden’s weakest point within his own party at the moment, Phillips doesn’t track too far off from Biden. He is a “passionate supporter of the state of Israel” who believes the country has a right to defend itself and that the US and its allies should unify to support Israel. He also has an “equal affection for Palestinians” and believes they deserve self-determination and a state. He has argued for the release of hostages and a concurrent ceasefire.“I intend to be the first Jewish American president in our history,” he said. “And I want to be the one that signs documents that help found the Palestinian state for the first time because we cannot continue to allow this cycle of bloodshed and misery and destruction to occur any longer.”To get anywhere near the presidency, Phillips would need to overcome a Democratic party already working hard to re-elect its incumbent president. Some states, such as Florida and North Carolina, have already decided not to hold primaries for president.The structural odds bother Phillips, who sees them as anti-democratic. The political culture on both sides forces people to stay in line rather than challenge the status quo if they want to keep their careers in elected office, he said. He knows his congressional career is done because of his presidential run – he’s not running for his seat in Minnesota again. And if he loses, he presumes his political career is over too. It will be worth it to him to try to keep Trump out of the White House, he said.“We need more people willing to torpedo their careers in Congress like I did, to ensure that we do not torpedo the entire country,” he said.Given the president’s age, though, staying in the race longer could be a hedge in case something were to happen to Biden. In that instance, it’s still tough to see how Phillips would be the best man for the job, though he’d be the only mainstream Democrat who had the primary calendar on his side.Still, he hopes more Democrats will jump in the presidential race. “The water is warm. Come on in. That’s what I’ve been asking for for many, many months,” Phillips said. “It gets to a point where doing so gets harder and harder because of state ballot access. Already, I think 15 states are too late to get on the ballot. So yes, I wish that would have happened months ago.” More

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      Anti-democracy playbook has new threats in store for the US in 2024

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      Two Republican officials in Arizona got charged for delaying approval of 2022 election results – and GOP state lawmakers vowed to retaliate against the Democratic attorney general who filed the charges.Rudy Giuliani faces millions in damages for defaming two Georgia election workers in 2020 – and continued to defame them outside the courtroom.Donald Trump himself is on trial in four jurisdictions, in part because of election subversion – and and gives public speeches on how he intends to take down his political enemies if he wins again.Such is the dichotomy of American democracy at this moment: attempts to hold election deniers accountable for their actions are met with doubling down and more intense election denial.Ahead of the 2020 elections, Trump foreshadowed his plan to claim the election was stolen if he lost, which his supporters often explained away as campaign trail bluster. But he and his followers took their election lies farther than many feared, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Biden only made it to the White House because of a handful of steadfast Republicans in key states who refused to bow to Trump’s attempts to overthrow Biden’s victory in the vote.These day, rather than subsiding after a series of bruising losses, adherence to election denialism is now a major flank of the mainstream Republican party. Trump’s most ardent supporters, some of whom now hold public office, have even sought to reclaim the term: they agree they are in fact election deniers, and proud of it. Their continued attempts to undermine elections since, combined with vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed, mean the US could be in for even worse this time around.That is, if Trump loses. If he wins, he’s vowed to use the Department of Justice to pursue vengeance against those who tried to hold him accountable. He’s called his political opponents “vermin”, using the language of authoritarian dictators.And if the urgent threat to American democracy extends from the most local levels of government to the courts and up to the presidency, it also comes at a time of fractured views of reality, with rampant rumor-spreading on social media.The potential for harassment, threats and violence has only grown since 2020. What was ad-hoc then is now well-worn: overturning an election in 2024 depends on more believers, especially those in powerful positions, using tactics that are well documented because they have been happening across the country for several years. The playbook is, in essence, already public.Threats from inside the governmentWhile just a few Republicans kept democracy intact in 2020, in 2024 a few could also dismantle it.Some prominent election deniers, like Kari Lake in Arizona and Tim Michels in Wisconsin, lost races that would have given them oversight of elections. But others won. One report by States United Democracy Center estimates that election deniers in 17 states are in top positions – like governor, attorney general or secretary of state – that oversee elections in some way.That means some who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged will help finalize results in 2024, making it much more possible for a presidential election to be overturned. If nothing else, they will almost certainly push delays in certifying election results (once a perfunctory process).At lower, more direct levels of government, where it’s also easier for the far right to find a friendly ear in elected office, election deniers could refuse to send results to their states – putting local votes in jeopardy and threatening the accuracy of election results. In 2022, local Republicans officials wouldn’t certify results in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. In Colorado in late 2023, the state Republican party told local boards not to sign off on statewide elections from November because the system was “rigged” and the process “disastrous”.A key tool of election denialism is the idea of hand counts. Grassroots groups have traveled the country since 2020 to spread word about pushing for full hand counts of ballots, finding allies like Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock executive.Most counties do hand count a small percentage of ballots to audit machine results, but very few do it all by hand. Some officials who tried to hand count against state law in a rural Arizona county were recently charged with felonies. In California, far-right officials in Shasta county instigated a hand count, but pulled back because of a state law banning it.Despite these failures, Telegram channels push for hand counts remain active. People show up monthly at the Cochise county board meetings in Arizona, still calling for a hand count next year. Georgia saw more hand recounts in its 2023 elections despite a lack of problems with machine counting.Other election denial tactics tie up the government through excessive public records requests. One small county in Georgia recently shared that it’s struggling to keep up with the huge increase in records requests, filed by rightwing groups purportedly to try to prove fraud.And there will undoubtedly be more frivolous lawsuits. In his effort to overturn his loss in 2020, Trump filed 62 lawsuits across state and federal courts – all but one of which failed. Some groups will probably file mass voter challenges claiming a broad swath of voters aren’t eligible to cast ballots, like True the Vote did in 2020.Some Republican-led states also now have “election integrity units” that investigate claims of fraud. These units have not found evidence of mass voter fraud; instead, they mostly dig up routine instances of one-off frauds, like voting for a dead person or in multiple places. Nonetheless, the units could be weaponized in 2024 to take on broader investigations at the behest of election-denying politicians.Beyond the elections themselves, judges could further hinder anti-discrimination laws. A federal appeals court issued a shocking ruling that would hobble civil rights groups’ ability to sue over violations to voting rights laws – removing the way voting rights laws get enforced in the courts, and putting responsibility solely on the government to bring these lawsuits instead. Another Republican-led appellate court, meanwhile, is considering a threat to the Voting Rights Act itself – the landmark achievement of the civil rights movement that makes racial discrimination in voting illegal.Rampant misinformation leads to harassment and threatsWith a proliferation of social media platforms, and the increasing politicization of fact-checking, it’ll be harder to slow down viral rumors that can affect elections – with the potential for real-world harassment or even violence at the polls.Take the example of drop boxes. An effort to “watch” them in 2020 saw people camping out at polling stations in Arizona, sometimes holding guns, and intimidating voters. A judge eventually barred drop-box watchers from taking photos or videos of voters and from bringing weapons.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut an ongoing misinformation campaign culminated in the movie 2000 Mules, which inaccurately attempted to use cellphone location data to show people allegedly visiting non-profits then dropping off ballots – claiming, with zero proof, that there was some kind of massive ballot-trafficking scheme happening. That, too, ensnared real people and cast them as criminals: one man in Georgia sued after the movie claimed he was a ballot “mule” based on footage of him dropping off ballots entirely legally.In perhaps the highest-profile case of abusing election workers, the Trump ally and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was just found liable for $148.1m for lies about two former election workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who testified their lives were torn apart after Giuliani and others falsely cast them at the center of a voter fraud conspiracy theory. Freeman had to move and no longer feels comfortable even using her name; Moss is too anxious to leave the house.Despite the lawsuit victory, many elections workers still feel the heat. Some have been harassed out of their jobs, or had their lives threatened – as of August, 14 people had been charged with such death threats. During the 2022 midterms, elections staff in Arizona’s Maricopa county saw messages that they would “swing for treason” and wishing them to “get cancer”. This year, elections offices in several states were sent letters containing fentanyl. Many have had to train workers to prepare for harassment.The onslaught has caused more elections workers to leave their jobs, creating high turnover that means more potential for mistakes by inexperienced people – such as in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county, where turnover played a role in several election incidents caused by human error. These mistakes can provide further ammunition for election deniers. But at the most basic level, people may be hesitant to work as poll workers or other election helpers – critical posts for the conduct of successful elections.Social media landscape makes lies harder to stopThat same fractured social media landscape has given the far right – including big personalities such as Trump, Lindell and Steve Bannon – platforms like Telegram, Rumble and Truth Social to post content that might be flagged on more established media platforms. This creates an information ecosystem that’s outside the mainstream and difficult to track, and where heated election claims run wild. Podcasts, too – especially Bannon’s – have huge audiences and serve as a launching pad for organizing the movement and sharing plans for elections. Lindell, the pillow salesman, goes on Bannon’s podcast to share “the plan”, his step-by-step manifesto to “prevent” the stealing of elections, and to hawk his pillows.Larger platforms, particularly X (formerly Twitter), have become less interested in monitoring and stopping election misinformation, creating more potential for it to spread during a contentious election year. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, decimated its workforce, including factcheckers, leaving the site vulnerable to increasing misinformation. He also allowed people previously banned from the platform, including conservative operatives such as Project Veritas and the disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to have their accounts back. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, now will allow political ads to claim the 2020 election was rigged or stolen; YouTube has reversed itself and now won’t take down content that makes false claims of fraud.In previous election cycles, researchers would flag misinformation and platforms would sometimes respond: for example, by amending fact-check notices to untrue statements. Government employees would sometimes flag these kinds of posts to tech companies as well – a practice that has come under intense scrutiny by conservatives in Congress, with the Republican Jim Jordan subpoenaing researchers about their work on misinformation. Courts have also restricted how the government can interact with social media companies in this way.Combined, it has a chilling effect – hindering researchers’ work on misinformation, the government’s ability to respond and social media companies’ incentives to intervene. Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher, claims Harvard fired her because she was critical of Facebook.What comes next is already happeningOn the right, the narrative of 2020 as a stolen election never ended. Some of those who lost still haven’t conceded, and the contest for US House speaker swirled around who was far-right enough, with “election integrity” and allegiance to Trump considered key criteria.There have, however, been attempts to hold election subversion accountable.Trump faces four court cases, both criminal and civil, in several states and at the federal level.States are investigating or have charged a number of Republicans, including some lawmakers and party officials, in the “fake elector” scheme, where people sent false electoral votes to Congress naming Trump not Biden as the winner. Defamation lawsuits proliferate. Lawyers who continually file lawsuits devoid of facts have been sanctioned across the country and face investigations by their state bar organizations.The most ardent believers in election fraud won’t see criminal charges or big defamation damages decisions as evidence the narrative was wrong – just as further proof of a conspiracy. Nor have all the lies seemed to help the one party that didn’t attempt to steal the election, the Democrats: polls show Biden trailing Trump and his approval rating tanking over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.A plague of voter apathy could deliver Trump back to the White House. If he wins, his campaign of retribution will begin, weaponizing the federal government for his personal aims. If he loses, the plan to overturn the results kicks off again – and this time, it could work. More

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      Revisited: why do Republicans hate the Barbie movie? – podcast

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      The Politics Weekly America team are taking a break. So for the next two weeks, we’re looking back at a couple of our favourite episodes of the year.
      From August: Jonathan Freedland and Amanda Marcotte try to figure it out why rightwing politicians and pundits took such a disliking to Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster. They look at what the outrage can tell us about how the Republicans will campaign in 2024

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      Colorado’s ruling to disqualify Trump sets up a showdown at supreme court

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      The Colorado ruling disqualifying Donald Trump from the ballot because he incited an insurrection on January 6 sets up another high-stakes, highly controversial political intervention by the US supreme court – a conservative-dominated panel to which Trump appointed three stringent rightwingers.Compromised in progressive eyes by those appointments and rulings including the removal of the federal right to abortion, the court was already due to decide whether Trump has immunity from prosecution regarding acts committed as president.Arising from one of four criminal indictments that have generated 91 charges, that case – concerning elected subversion if not incitement of insurrection – has produced intense scrutiny of Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice and a hardline conservative also at the centre of an ethics scandal.Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is a hard-right activist who was deeply involved in attempts to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, a defeat which according to Trump’s lie was the result of electoral fraud.With the Colorado ruling, calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse from cases involving Trump will no doubt increase – and no doubt continue to be ignored.On Tuesday, the progressive strategist Rachel Bitecofer said: “Justice Thomas will get to weigh in on whether Trump engaged in insurrection for the same plot his own wife helped organise. Extraordinary.”Earlier, in a scene of extraordinary Washington pageantry, Biden addressed Thomas and the other justices at a memorial service for Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the court.Speaking at the National Cathedral, the president delivered a passage that would within hours assume greater significance.To O’Connor, Biden said, the court was “the bedrock of America. It was a vital line of defence for the values and the vision of our republic, devoted not to the pursuit of power for power’s sake but to make real the promise of America – the American promise that holds that we’re all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.”Citing that need for equality before the law, some prominent observers said the supreme court should uphold the Colorado ruling.J Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who testified before the House January 6 committee and has written with the Harvard professor Laurence Tribe on the 14th amendment, called the Colorado ruling “historic”, “masterful” and “brilliant”.“It will be a test of America’s commitment to its democracy, to its constitution and to the rule of law,” Luttig told MSNBC, adding: “Arguably, when it is decided by the supreme court, it will be the single most important constitutional decision in all of our history.“… It is an unassailable … decision that the former president is disqualified from the presidency because he conducted, engaged in or aided or supported an insurrection or rebellion against the United States constitution.”But others were not so supportive.Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor from George Washington University who has appeared as a witness for House Republicans seeking to impeach Biden on grounds of supposed corruption, told Fox News: “This court has handed partisans on both sides the ultimate tool to try to shortcut elections. And it’s very, very dangerous.“This country is a powder keg, and this court is throwing matches at it. And I think it’s a real mistake. I think they’re wrong on the law. You know, January 6 was many things, most of it not good. In my view it was not an insurrection, it was a riot.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That doesn’t mean 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.“This is a time where we actually need democracy. We need to allow the voters to vote to hear their decision. And the court just said, ‘You’re not going to get that in Colorado, we’re not going to let you vote for Donald Trump.’ You can dislike Trump, you can believe he’s responsible for January 6, but this isn’t the way to do it.”Adopted in 1868, section three of the 14th amendment barred former Confederates from office after the civil war. But it has rarely been used. In Trump’s case, much legal argument has centered on whether the presidency counts as an office, as defined in the text. In Colorado, a lower court found that it did not. The state supreme court found that it did. That argument now goes to the highest court in the land.After the Colorado ruling, many observers also pointed out that Trump has not been convicted of inciting an insurrection, or charged with doing so. He was impeached for inciting an insurrection on January 6 but acquitted at trial in the Senate, where enough Republicans stayed loyal.What is clear is that thanks to Colorado, a US supreme court already racked by politics and with historically low approval ratings will once again pitch into the partisan fight. On Tuesday, Trump seized on the Colorado ruling as he has his criminal indictments: as battle cry and fundraising tool. His Republican opponents also slammed the ruling.Last month, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Eric Foner, an expert on the civil war and Reconstruction, spoke to the Guardian about 14th amendment challenges to Trump, including in Colorado. A successful case, Foner said, would be likely to act on Trump like “a red flag in front of a bull”.So, it seems clear, will anything the US supreme court now does regarding the Colorado ruling.On Wednesday a Trump attorney, Jay Sekulow, said on his own internet show he expected the court to act quickly, with “the next 10 days … critical in this case” and oral arguments likely by mid-January. His son and co-host, Jordan Sekulow, countered that a slow-moving case could not be counted out. 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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      Why did Colorado kick Donald Trump off the ballot? – podcast

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      In a shock decision overnight, the Colorado supreme court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again in that state.
      The 4-3 decision cited a rarely used provision of the US constitution, arguing that Trump should be disqualified for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. So what does it all mean? Will this historic decision actually prevent Trump from running? Or, like most hurdles the Republican frontrunner faces, will it just bolster his appeal?
      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Devika Bhat about how this might play out in 2024

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      Why did Colorado disqualify Trump from the state’s 2024 election ballot?

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      The Colorado supreme court has ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again, citing his role in the January 6 attack, in a 4-3 ruling that will probably have major legal and political ramifications for the 2024 election.The decision removes Trump from the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot, and stems from a rarely used provision of the US constitution known as the insurrection clause.Trump’s campaign promised to immediately appeal to the US supreme court, which could well strike it down. Similar lawsuits are working their way through the courts in other states.Here’s what we know so far, and what it might mean for the former president and current Republican frontrunner.What is the insurrection clause and why was it used?The decision by the Colorado supreme court is the first time a candidate has been deemed ineligible for the White House under the US constitutional provision.Section 3 of the 14th amendment, also referred to as the insurrection clause, bars anyone from Congress, the military, and federal and state offices who once took an oath to uphold the constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it.Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment helped ensure civil rights for formerly enslaved people, but also was intended to prevent former Confederate officials from regaining power as members of Congress and taking over the government they had just rebelled against.Some legal scholars say the post-civil war clause applies to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the transfer of power to Joe Biden by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol.“The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, told the Guardian in a recent interview. “Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power they would do the same if not worse.”How did this happen?The case was brought by a group of Colorado voters, aided by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), who argued Trump should be disqualified from the ballot for his role in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, celebrated the decision as “not only historic and justified, but … necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.Colorado’s highest court overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found Trump’s actions on January 6 did amount to inciting an insurrection, but said he could not be barred from the ballot, because it was unclear that the clause was intended to cover the role of the presidency.A majority of the state supreme court’s seven justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, disagreed.Has this happened before?The provision has rarely been used, and never in such a high-profile case. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist, contending he gave aid and comfort to the country’s enemies during the first world war.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast year, in the clause’s first use since then, a New Mexico judge barred a rural county commissioner who had entered the Capitol on January 6 from office.What does this mean for the election?The Colorado ruling applies only to the state’s Republican primary, which will take place on 5 March, meaning Trump might not appear on the ballot for that vote.It temporarily stayed its ruling until 4 January, however, which would allow the US supreme court until then to decide whether to take the case. That’s the day before the qualifying deadline for candidates.Colorado is no longer a swing state – Biden won it by a double-digit margin in 2020, and the last time a Republican won it was 2004 – but the ruling could influence other cases across the US, where dozens of similar cases are percolating. Other state courts have ruled against the plaintiffs; in Michigan, a judge ruled that Congress, not the courts, should make the call.Advocates hoped the case would boost a wider disqualification effort and potentially put the issue before the US supreme court. It’s unclear whether the court might rule on narrow procedural and technical grounds, or answer the underlying constitutional question of whether Trump can be banished from the ballot under the 14th amendment.The case could have significant political fallout as well. Trump allies will paint it as an anti-democratic effort to thwart the will of the American people, lumping it in with the numerous legal cases he faces in state and federal court.“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 congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a close Trump ally, posted on social media.Trump didn’t mention the decision during a rally on Tuesday evening in Iowa but his campaign sent out a fundraising email calling it a “tyrannical ruling” and a statement saying:“Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November.”Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the 14th amendment’s language does not apply to the presidency. A lawyer for Trump has also argued that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was not serious enough to qualify for insurrection, and that any remarks that Trump made to his supporters that day in Washington were protected under free speech. More