A group of voters seeking to block Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot in the 2024 US presidential election announced Tuesday they are challenging a ruling that he can run despite having engaged in insurrection.
The Republican leader has made the deadly January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol and his false voter fraud claims that led to it the centerpiece of his campaign as he seeks a return to the Oval Office.
Four Republican voters and two independents in Colorado had claimed that Trump is ruled out in 2024 by a constitutional prohibition on federal officials appearing on the ballot after breaking their oath of office by taking part in an insurrection.
A court in Denver ruled Friday that Trump’s incitement of the violence at the Capitol did indeed amount to insurrection — the first ever such finding — but added that the provision does not apply to the presidency.
“The court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” Judge Sarah Wallace said.
“Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”
The 14th Amendment bars someone from holding “any office… under the United States” if they engaged in insurrection after taking an oath as “an officer of the United States” to “support” the Constitution.
But the amendment cannot apply to Trump, Wallace said, because it leaves the presidency out of its list of federal elected positions.
Wallace ruled that Trump was not an “officer of the United States” in any case, as the Constitution distinguishes the presidency from federal officers.
The left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the voters, said it had asked the Colorado Supreme Court to overturn that part of the decision.
“We are planning to build on the trial judge’s incredibly important ruling that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection, and we are ready to take this case as far as necessary to ensure that Donald Trump is removed from the ballot,” the group’s president Noah Bookbinder said.
Trump’s historic indictments for allegedly leading a criminal conspiracy to steal the 2020 election — one at the federal level and another in Georgia — have opened a legal debate over his eligibility for future office.
The Colorado action is one of multiple 14th Amendment lawsuits against Trump proceeding across the country. Minnesota’s top court threw out a similar move earlier this month.
The Trump campaign hailed the decision to allow Trump to run in Colorado as “another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges,” but has also appealed to have the insurrection finding overturned.
