OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Minnesota Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could be a death blow to Democrats and RINO Republican plans to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot.
The court issued a verdict declining to keep the former president off the Republican primary ballot, which could impact similar cases in Colorado and Michigan, Fox News reported.
The lawsuits want to use Clause 3 of the 14th Amendment, that was designed after the Civil War to prevent former Confederates from attaining some elected positions, to keep the former president off of the ballot.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having 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, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability,” it reads.
“There is no state statute that prohibits a major political party from placing on the presidential nomination primary ballot, or sending delegates to the national convention supporting, a candidate who is ineligible to hold office,” Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson said in the decision.
The ruling does keep the possibility of keeping the former president off of the general election ballot alive.
Fox News reported.
Last month, a federal judge in New Hampshire also dismissed a lawsuit that sought to use the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot.
A source familiar with the decisions and proceedings told Fox News Digital the challenges being rejected “sets precedent,” which will make it “harder and harder to keep Trump off the ballot” in other states.
Currently pending is a decision out of a Colorado lawsuit. Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and six Colorado voters filed their lawsuit in September to block Trump from appearing on the primary ballot, citing the 14th Amendment.
The Trump team has made multiple motions to dismiss the case, but Judge Sarah B. Wallace has rejected them.
Wallace has scheduled closing arguments for next week.
“It gets to the concept known in the law as persuasive authority. The law distinguishes between binding authority in a jurisdiction and persuasive authority, which means if you’re going to go against it, you better have a good reason or a persuasive argument for why you’re going to do it,” Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said.
“The more current law you get for the proposition that it is not a basis to remove someone, the harder it is for judges to break ground and go the other way, but we shouldn’t pretend that it is bulletproof.”
He added that “persuasive authority doesn’t have to be followed.”
“I think, yes, the more precedent you get on the books that this is not an adequate way to go and that what we ought to do is let the public go to the polls on Election Day and decide the election — the more you have people saying that — the better it is,” the former prosecutor said.
“But if it looks in September 2024 like Trump can win the election, I wouldn’t put anything past these guys. Anything,” he said.
“I think they’ll try to resist doing that because it’s pretty radical,” the former prosecutor said. “But desperate times call for desperate measures if it looks like he has the chance of winning.”
“In my mind, the 14th Amendment, Section 3, doesn’t even apply to the presidency because it itemizes the list of offices that people are not eligible for, and it doesn’t mention the president of the United States or the vice president of the United States, which is a strange omission because it does mention electors of the president and goes through pains of mentioning senators and members of the house,” he said.
“The theory is that there is a catch-all provision that refers to any federal official, but I don’t think that can sensibly be applied to the president after you’ve gone through the trouble of listing all of these other offices.
“If the drafters of that amendment wanted to include the presidency, they would have said so,” he said.
