A government watchdog group has filed a lawsuit seeking to keep former US President Donald Trump from voting in Colorado
ALMOND NGAN
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A Colorado court on Monday began hearing a lawsuit seeking to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential election on the grounds that he violated his oath of office by participating in an insurrection.
The case, one of several similar legal attempts to bar the former president from running, is likely to eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservatives have a 6-3 majority.
The lawsuit, filed in Colorado by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a Washington-based watchdog group, alleges that Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again due to his supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 Question comes.
The argument, which is causing sharp disagreement among legal scholars, relies on an amendment to the Constitution ratified after the Civil War of 1861-65.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits anyone from holding public office engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” after once pledging to support and defend the Constitution.
The amendment, ratified in 1868, aimed to prevent supporters of the slaveholding Confederacy from being elected to Congress or holding federal office.
On behalf of six Colorado voters, CREW petitioned the Colorado Secretary of State, the top election official in the western state, to bar Trump from the ballot in next year’s presidential election.
“Trump incited a violent mob to attack our Capitol in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power under our Constitution,” Eric Olson, an attorney for CREW, said in his opening statement at the livestreamed hearing before Judge Sarah Wallace in Denver.
“January 6 was an insurrection against the Constitution,” Olson said. “Trump was involved in this insurrection.
“We are here because Trump claims that after all this he has the right to be president again,” he said. “But our constitution, our common charter of our nation, says he cannot do that.”
Scott Gessler, a former U.S. secretary of state from Colorado who represents Trump, countered that the lawsuit was “anti-democratic” and urged the judge to dismiss it.
“When it comes to deciding who will lead our nation, it is the people of the United States of America who can make those decisions,” Gessler said. “We have elections.
“This is a case of litigation aimed at interfering with the presidential election,” he said.
The Minnesota Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a similar case on Thursday in which several electors are seeking to disqualify Trump from running in the northern state.
According to CREW, eight officials have been disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment since 1868, but only one recently, a New Mexico county commissioner who was removed from office for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump, 77, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington in March on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the November 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
He faces similar charges in another case in the southern state of Georgia.
Trump was impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives after the attack on the Capitol – he was accused of inciting insurrection – but was acquitted by the Senate.
Trump has rejected attempts to remove him from the presidential election, saying they have “no legal basis.”
“Like election interference, it is just another ‘trick’ used by the radical left communists, Marxists and fascists to steal another election,” he said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
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Source : www.barrons.com