Activists and voters have filed numerous lawsuits around the country claiming the former president is barred from office under the “insurrection clause.”
[The ruling by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat,] on Thursday increases the pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and ultimately decide Trump’s fate — as the Colorado GOP petitioned the justices this week to do.
Unlike the Colorado ruling, this one comes from an individual officeholder affiliated with the Democratic Party. And Maine, unlike Colorado, has been a presidential battleground in recent years; under an unusual state law, it cast one of its Electoral College votes for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
Another state has removed Trump from its ballots, citing the insurrection clause of the US 14th Amendment.
I am not at all confident the Supreme Court will uphold the Colorado ruling, especially given three of the SC justices were appointed by Trump himself.
I do think it’s unlikely the Court will uphold. I hear the argument for removing Trump from the ballot, and I don’t dismiss it outright like a lot of people do, but I do think it seems a little shady to block the obvious R front runner from being on the ballot when Jan. 6 was bad and was obviously contributed to by Trump, but was nothing like the Civil War in my opinion, which this rule was created to deal with.
One possibility I see is that the SC tries to retain some credibility by punting this back to the states. They rule something along the lines of, without explicit guidance from Congress then each state may come up with their own rules for determining how the insurrection clause applies, and these rules will hold until such time that Congress speaks up, even if they are inconsistent with or even outright contradict the rules from another state.
Thus he technically loses, and is stricken from both democratic Colorado and Maine, but no one will be able to use the SC ruling to get him off the ballot in e.g. Texas or Alabama.
The other way the SC could punt is simply to run out the clock, and when the GOP primaries have been decided simply declare the issue moot. (This wouldn’t work if the guy ends up winning the Presidency as then they’d have to resolve the question of his ineligibility at some point - but if he loses in the end they can just wait for him to lose and then say it’s moot, because deciding the answer wouldn’t have changed the outcome - he wouldn’t have become President again either way.) The cynic in me can see the SC preferring to punt this way as it leaves the door open to actually ruling in favor of using the insurrection clause this way - in some future election cycle against a Dem presidential candidate who doesn’t deserve it.
