Trump Goes to War With Maine's Secretary of State
Matt Vespa
Donald Trump lucked out with Colorado: the state backed down, reversed course, and put his name back on the 2024 ballot. The Centennial State dropped a 2024 bomb when its state Supreme Court stripped Trump’s name off its ballot, invoking the shoddy 14th Amendment argument that Trump cannot run for president because he incited armed insurrection against the government. Trump hasn’t been charged with insurrection. Not even Special Counsel Jack Smith’s army of anti-Trump lawyers could cobble together enough evidence to add that charge in any of the indictments against the former president.
California looked into removing Trump from their ballot. New Hampshire did as well, but both states backed away. Maine did not. Their secretary of state isn’t caving either, forcing the Trump team to go on the offensive and appeal the ruling (via Wall Street Journal):
Donald Trump’s campaign on Tuesday asked a Maine court to reverse last week’s decision by the state’s top election official to remove the Republican front-runner from the presidential ballot.
Trump’s legal team filed a suit in Kennebec County Superior Court defending his eligibility for office and challenging the authority of Maine’s secretary of state to disqualify him from its primary contest.
Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, issued a written decision Thursday finding that Trump incited an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 following his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
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Similar legal proceedings have been unfolding in other states, and Trump has won several initial decisions. Election officials in several other states, including Democrats in Massachusetts and Oregon, have said they wouldn’t kick Trump off the ballot without a court order.
“The Secretary made multiple errors of law and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner; and President Trump will be illegally excluded from the ballot as a result of the Secretary’s actions,” Trump’s lawsuit in Maine stated.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Bellows was a biased decision maker and that she had no authority to consider constitutional challenges to the former president’s eligibility to hold office again.
State law, his lawyers said, limits the secretary of state’s review to questions about a candidate’s residence and party designation. State authorities in general aren’t empowered to enforce the 14th Amendment disqualification provision without legislation from Congress, his lawyers said.
They also argued that the provision may not be applied to a former president and disputed that Trump actually engaged in an insurrection. Some legal scholars say that requires proof that Trump engaged in the attack, not just encouraged or aided it.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/03/trump-appeals-maine-decision-n2633102
