Former President Trump has now petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the recent Colorado ruling declaring him to be an insurrectionist ineligible to be on the 2024 presidential ballot.
Filed Wednesday, the petition said the Colorado Supreme Court ruling wrongly excluded Trump from the 2024 primary ballot by preventing “voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.”
“The question of eligibility to serve as President of the United States is properly reserved for Congress, not the state courts, to consider and decide,” it said.
The petition further argued that the Colorado Supreme Court misapplied Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment in its ruling by wrongfully classifying the former president as an “officer of the United States,” saying, “President Trump falls outside the scope of section 3.”
As a separate issue, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment can only apply to those who have “previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States.” President Trump was never an “officer of the United States” according to the U.S. Constitution’s text and structure.
Even on those very standards, the Colorado Supreme Court argued that the former president engaged in “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, which the petition said lacks merit.
“The Colorado Supreme Court erred in how it described President Trump’s role in the events of January 6, 2021,” the petitions adds. “It was not ‘insurrection’ and President Trump in no way ‘engaged” in ‘insurrection.'”
“‘Insurrection’ as understood at the time of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment meant the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” it said. “By contrast, the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent.”
“Moreover, nothing that President Trump did ‘engaged’ in ‘insurrection,'” it said. “His only explicit instructions called for protesting ‘peacefully and patriotically,’ to ‘support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,’ to ‘[s]tay peaceful,’ and to ‘remain peaceful.'”
If the Colorado ruling were allowed to stand, the petition said that it would “unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” asserting that only Congress, not a state court, can be allowed to remove a candidate’s eligibility.
The case is Trump v. Anderson, and has not yet been assigned a docket number at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free stream can also be purchased on Google Play or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
