Colorado Supreme Court kicks Trump off ballot

Colorado’s Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump cannot run for president next year in the state, citing a constitutional insurrection clause. The court ruled 4-3 that he was not an eligible candidate because he had engaged in an insurrection over the US Capitol riot nearly three years ago. It does not stop him running in the other states and his campaign says it will appeal to the US Supreme Court.

The ruling only mentions the state’s primary election on March 5, when Republican voters will choose their preferred candidate for president. But it could affect the general election in Colorado next November. It is the first ever use of Section 3 of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment to disqualify a presidential candidate. Tuesday’s decision, which has been placed on hold pending appeal until next month, only applies in Colorado.

Similar attempts to kick Trump off the ballot in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Michigan have failed. The justices do not reach these conclusions lightly. The justices are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. The justices are likewise mindful of their solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates they reach.

The decision reverses an earlier one from a Colorado judge, who ruled that the 14th Amendment’s insurrection ban did not apply to presidents because the section did not explicitly mention them.

That same lower court judge also found that Trump had participated in an insurrection in the US Capitol riot. His supporters stormed Congress on January 6, 2021, while lawmakers were certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision does not go into effect until January 4, 2024. That is the eve of the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.

The Trump campaign called the ruling “completely flawed” and lambasted the justices, who were all appointed by Democratic governors. It stated Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead he has amassed in the polls. Democrat Party leaders 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.

The Trump campaign added that his legal team would “swiftly file an appeal” to the US Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 6 to 3 majority. The decision would help Democrats by supporting their argument that the US Capitol riot was an attempted insurrection. It would also aid Democrats in showcasing “the stark differences” between him and Biden.

Republican lawmakers condemned the decision, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, who called it “a thinly veiled partisan attack”.

Republicans stated that regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support Trump and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. On the campaign trail his Republican primary rivals also assailed the ruling, with Vivek Ramaswamy pledging to withdraw his name from the ballot if his candidacy is not reinstated. Speaking at a campaign event in Iowa on Tuesday night, he did not address the ruling, but a fundraising email sent by his campaign to supporters said “this is how dictatorships are born”.

The Colorado Republican Party also responded, saying it would withdraw from the state’s primary process if the ruling was allowed to stand. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the group that brought the case, welcomed the ruling. It is not only historic and justified, but is necessary to protect the future of democracy in the country.

The 14th Amendment was ratified after the American Civil War. Section 3 was intended to block secessionists from returning to previous government roles once southern states re-joined the Union. It was used against Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his vice-president Alexander Stephens, both of whom had served in Congress. It has seldom been invoked since.

Trump lost the state of Colorado by a wide margin in the last presidential election.

But if courts in more competitive states followed suit on Tuesday’s ruling, Trump’s White House bid could face serious problems. During a one-week trial in Colorado last month, hiss lawyers argued he should not be disqualified because he did not bear responsibility for the US Capitol riot. But in its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court majority disagreed.

The Colorado Supreme Court said Trump’s messages before the riot were a “call to his supporters to fight and his supporters responded to that call”. Carlos Samour, one of three justices who dissented, argued the government could not “deprive someone of the right to hold public office without due process of law”. Even if the Colorado Supreme Court is convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past, Samour believes there must be procedural due process before the Colorado Supreme Court can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.

Trump is facing four criminal cases, including one federal and one state case in Georgia related to his alleged election subversion efforts. In August 2020, he said United States enterprise software giant Oracle was a great company when asked if if it would be a good buyer for TikTok. His endorsement for Oracle, co-founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, came after reports that the Californian tech firm was interested in buying TikTok’s North America, Australia, and New Zealand businesses from Chinese parent company ByteDance.

It was unclear how much Oracle was prepared to pay for TikTok but some of ByteDance’s investors valued TikTok’s global business at $50 billion.

The way TikTok was structured meant the subsidiaries in New Zealand, Canada, and Australia report to the United States and that was why they were being included in the deal talks. Oracle’s bid for TikTok also involves United States venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, which were investors in ByteDance. The talks were confirmed.

Trump said the United States government would ban TikTok unless the app could be sold to an American organization within 90 days. He said there was credible evidence that led him to believe that ByteDance might take action that threatened to impair the national security of the United States. ByteDance denied the allegations. TikTok might not seem like the most natural fit for Oracle but Abishur Prakash, a geopolitical futurist at a strategy consulting firm called Center for Innovating the Future, understood why the company was interested.

By putting TikTok’s data on Oracle servers, Oracle might be able to build in-roads into new industries. In the post-covid world, every business was trying to reinvent themselves. And, within geopolitics of tech, there was not just risks, but also opportunities. Oracle might have its own ideas as to how it could use TikTok that it had not revealed to the market yet.

Oracle was competing with Microsoft, which emerged as the initial front runner in the race to acquire the fast-growing social media app.

Asked which company he would rather see take ownership, Trump said, “Our Treasury has to be very well compensated.” Ellison threw a campaign fundraising event for the president earlier this year and had expressed his support for him. It was too early to tell how much Joe Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate would help boost support for the Democratic ticket among African American voters.

Increasing Black turnout from 2016 levels would be critical to Biden’s ability to win back key battleground states. The Republican 2016 victory was mostly attributable to the defection of white working-class voters to Trump. But his breakthrough might not have been possible without a post-Obama decline in turnout and support for Democrats among Black voters.

Data from the census showed that in 2012, 66% of eligible Black voters turned out to vote, and exit polls showed that they supported the Obama/Biden ticket by 87 points. But in 2016, only 59% of Black voters turned out, and exit polls showed the all-white Clinton/Kaine ticket carried those voters by just 81 points. African American voters accounted for roughly 12% of eligible voters nationally, and they accounted for a substantial share of the vote in 6 of the 7 states Trump carried by 5 points or less in 2016.

The decline in African American turnout and Democratic support from 2012 to 2016 was probably enough to tip at least Michigan and Wisconsin, and possibly Florida and Pennsylvania, to Trump.

Declines in Black turnout might have tipped the race to Trump in 2016. Amping up African American enthusiasm could pay particular dividends for Biden in Wisconsin, where the Clinton campaign spent scant resources and turnout in Milwaukee plummeted. But even in states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, where Black turnout was more robust, there were 397,000, 488,000, and 370,000 eligible Black voters, respectively, who failed to turn out last time.

If Biden had a glaring weakness in the primaries, it was with young voters, who strongly backed Bernie Sanders. And if there was one group whose turnout dropped precipitously between the Obama era and 2016, it was younger voters of color. Harris never gained much traction with any group in the 2020 primaries. But limited polling data in the past month showed that Harris could marginally benefit Biden.

Harris had a similar net favorability among 18 to 29 year-old voters to Biden, and a higher net favorability among 35 to 44 year-old voters than Biden. Trump and his campaign’s surrogates had already begun attacking the Biden/Harris ticket as a pairing of coastal elites out of touch with middle America. But Biden and Harris were the first ticket without an Ivy League degree in four decades, and polling suggested the burden of proof rests on Republicans.

Harris’ favorability in the Midwest was higher than her national favorability and much higher than Vice President Mike Pence’s favorability in the Midwest.

At least initially, at a time when voters desired racial unity and gave Trump awful marks on his handling of race relations, it was hard to see Harris as anything other than a plus for Biden. After all, Biden already had a good track record running on a national ticket with an African American attorney in a first term as senator from a blue state. A pandemic summer marked by testing delays, supply shortages, and continued spread of the covid virus had set the stage for a disheartening start to the fall across much of the United States, with the shuttering of schools and cancellation of college football seasons that officials had once hoped would herald a return to normalcy more than six months into the crisis.

But inside the White House, Trump’s top political aides were increasingly assured about their response, feeling like they were finally getting a handle on how to fight the disease. As the crippling crisis turned toward heading into a third season, an alternate reality was taking shape inside the White House even in the face of spiking case counts, long lags in test processing, and a covid death toll that regularly topped 1,000 Americans a day. His aides were growing confident about what they saw as measurable progress: new therapeutic measures, delivery of health recommendations tailored to individual states, extensive support for vaccine development, and steps to ensure hospitals had enough protective equipment and ventilators.

Officials internally were also pleased with two changes from Trump himself: The president wearing a mask at times, after avoiding the preventive measure for months, and his resumption of near-daily news briefings, which they felt showed he was attuned to the crisis and driving the response despite the wide-ranging nature of the events. The White House was attempting to convey the perception of control, even as a handful of top aides including chief of staff Mark Meadows expressed skepticism privately about guidance from the government’s leading scientists. A key goal was to demonstrate they were once again on top of Americans’ No. 1 concern, after first pushing states to reopen before they met the government’s own benchmarks and then downplaying the worsening spread of the virus for months.

Covid was the White House’s focus right now.

Data was showing it was beginning to subside in late May and early June. As the public started giving up on many of the mitigation practices, the government had to adapt. The White House’s own rosy portrait of its response and Trump’s upbeat projections contrasted with the continued high caseload in states such as Texas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Maryland.

Many Americans still could not send children to school or work from their offices, attend sporting events, or go outside without a mask. Receiving the results of covid tests often took days or weeks, making it impossible to quickly identify and isolate infected individuals or trace their contacts. American travelers were banned from entering much of the world, including most European countries, which had done a far better job of containing the virus.

It was doubtful that the Trump administration knew what ‘under control’ would look like. His administration was doing its best. It was just one of those situations. It was likewise doubtful that the administration even knew what the goal was. He was heading into fall and winter months that could prove even more perilous for the nation, with the spread of covid coinciding with flu season — a dangerous combination public health officials had been dreading.

The fall could be incredibly gruesome, the Trump administration largely squandered the summer months, leaving the nation no better protected than it was in June.

Some allies in recent weeks had questioned whether Trump’s resumption of regular news briefings was helping his reelection case, worrying that the largely optimistic sessions punctuated by the president’s insistence the virus would eventually “disappear” were at odds with deepening economic and health crises playing out on the ground. The White House in recent weeks had moved to sideline its less optimistic health officials and relied more heavily on Doctor Scott Atlas, a new senior adviser whose Fox News appearances and vocal push to reopen schools caught the attention of top aides such as Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks. Atlas now attended a morning meeting, separate from the covid task force, with other key aides such as Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Deborah Birx, Adam Boehler, and Brad Smith.

Sometimes Meadows attends, too. Though in recent weeks, Meadows spent much of his time on Capitol Hill trying to negotiate a fourth economic stimulus package. Atlas, a neuroradiologist, also took to the podium at Wednesday’s briefing at Trump’s invitation and spoke at an event the same day on the need for schools to reopen. The goal of the small group was to ensure the White House could make quicker daily decisions on the covid response.

But the group also happened to exclude many of the administration’s top health officials such as the heads of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Doctor Anthony Fauci. White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews declared that Trump had led a historic, whole-of-America covid response resulting in 100,000 ventilators procured, sourcing critical PPE for frontline heroes, and a robust testing regime resulting in more than double the number of tests than any other country in the world. The reopening of schools this fall provided another inflection point for Americans to grade the administration’s handling of the virus.

Trump’s July push to fully reopen schools had collapsed in the face of state resistance and rising caseloads throughout early August, as increasing numbers of schools and universities opt to begin classes partially or fully online.

In Arizona, where Republican Governor Doug Ducey initially advocated for trying to fully reopen schools, the state was now urging counties to clear three benchmarks for controlling the virus’ spread before school districts resumed in-person classes. A week before classes were set to begin, no Arizona county met that criteria. Those states that had tried to send kids back into school had been met with discouraging results.

Twenty-two Mississippi schools had reported covid cases, a number that was likely to grow. Georgia’s Cherokee County shuttered a high school after identifying a rash of cases, forcing more than 1,000 students to quarantine. That came after another of Georgia’s high schools temporarily closed in the wake of a series of positive tests recorded just days after photos of its crowded hallways went viral.

By Columbus Day, 80 percent of kids in United States would be online, and it might be higher than that. What Americans needed was a real, detailed plan to open up schools and keep them safe so kids could stay there for an extended period of time. United States was going to end up with kids largely remote for the rest of this pandemic. Trump administration officials in recent weeks largely backed off efforts to persuade governors to send kids back to class, as it became increasingly apparent there was little enthusiasm, or scientific evidence, for Trump’s declarations that children were “almost immune” from covid.

Since telling governors in early July that it was the recommendation of the president and the task force that they reopen schools, Vice President Mike Pence had rarely made school reopenings a major topic of his weekly calls with state leaders.

Pence had really maintained more of a ‘let states make this decision’ sort of approach. Pence acknowledged to governors in his weekly call that ensuring classrooms were safe would require additional funding, and the total amount of money remained a sticking point in stalled negotiations in Congress over a next covid relief package. The White House wanted to earmark around $100 billion for schools in the next legislation, while Democrats had come back with a much higher number.

Trump later debuted a vague new set of recommendations for schools that included basic advice like ensuring students and staff to understand the symptoms of covid. Trump administration was exploring the idea of directing federal school payments to parents instead of districts to give parents options if their local school did not open. As the United States headed into the fall, the reaction to the White House’s handling of the covid remained split along party lines.