Former President Donald Trump has filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that disqualified him from the state’s primary ballot.
The ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court stems from a lawsuit that alleged the former president violated Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that no person can hold a public office if they took an oath on the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection.”
The appeal filed by Trump’s legal team stated that more than 1.3 million people in the state voted for him during the 2020 presidential election, and these people would be stripped of their ability to vote for him in 2024.
“Thus, the Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” explained the appeal.
“Indeed, the Maine Secretary of State, in an administrative proceeding, has already used the Colorado proceedings as justification for unlawfully striking President Trump from that state’s ballot.”
These comments relate to the ruling from Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows that Trump engaged in an insurrection and would be disqualified from the state’s primary ballot, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
This ruling was also appealed by Trump, who stated in an 11-page complaint that Bellows “was the product of a process infected by bias and pervasive lack of due process.”
Trump’s filing is the second appeal seeking to overturn the Colorado court’s ruling, following on the heels of an appeal filed by the Colorado Republican Party, which alleged that the state court’s decision was “fundamentally changing the course of American democracy.”
Following the filing of this appeal, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced that Trump would appear on the ballot, barring a decision from SCOTUS.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Colorado case filed a 33-page brief expressing support of SCOTUS weighing in on the ruling, writing that the Court “should resolve this case on an expedited timetable.”
“Although the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was correct and implicates no split of authority, this Court should nevertheless grant certiorari. This case is of utmost national importance. And given the upcoming presidential primary schedule, there is no time to wait for the issues to percolate further,” wrote the attorneys in the brief.
Trump has faced more than a dozen lawsuits seeking to remove him from the ballot due to a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but Colorado and Maine are the only two states that have disqualified him thus far.
This case would be the first time SCOTUS has ruled on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was added to the Constitution following the Civil War to prevent Confederate leaders from being voted back into power.
