OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Colorado Supreme Court, which is made up entirely of justices nominated by Democrats, reached a groundbreaking and contentious ruling on Tuesday. The state’s highest court ruled 4-3 to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state’s Republican primary election in 2024.
William W. Hood III, Melissa Hart, Richard L. Gabriel, and Monica Márquez are the four justices who made the decision. Each of these justices, appointed by Democratic-affiliated governors, has had their background thoroughly investigated in light of the decision.
The decision has caused a great deal of controversy because it is based on the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, which bars people who have participated in an insurrection from running for federal office. A lot of people think the decision was politically motivated and set a dangerous precedent for American politics.
June 2015 saw the appointment of Yale alum and Penn law school graduate Justice Richard L. Gabriel to Colorado’s highest court. His time in office has not been without controversy. A female law clerk accused him of harassing her in 2021, the Denver Post reports.
The Colorado Supreme Court appointed Justice Melissa Hart, a Harvard Law School alumna, in December 2017. Her appointment came after she had served as a professor at Colorado’s law school. Hart was allegedly involved in a black job applicant’s eventually dismissed discrimination case at the Supreme Court, as reported in The Daily Mail. By passing over Michele Brown for the position of rules attorney, Hart and the other judges were allegedly discriminating against her based on her race and age.
With her historic appointment to the Colorado Supreme Court in 2010, Justice Monica Márquez—an alumna of Stanford University and Yale Law School—became the first Latina and openly homosexual justice in the state. Some have claimed that her political leanings, rather than a consideration of legal merit, influenced her decision on the Trump ballot issue.
Appointed in January 2014 was Justice William W. Hood III, who earned a Juris Doctor degree from UVA. Each Colorado justice involved in the decision to remove Trump’s name from the ballot is a graduate of prestigious East Coast universities, which the Post Millennial wasted no time bringing to light.
This four-judge panel of Colorado’s highest court has made a decision that has ignited heated debate.
Conservatives, who see Trump’s disqualification as an extreme case of judicial overreach, have been vocal in their opposition to the move. They fear that the legal system is becoming dangerously politicized. Experts in the field of law and members of Trump’s campaign have labeled the decision as an unfair attack on the independence of the judiciary and the democratic principle of popular sovereignty.
“Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung wrote.
The ruling has stoked more debate due to its possible effects on Trump’s eligibility in other states and on the presidential race as a whole. Justice Carlos Samour, who disagreed with the majority, expressed his criticism of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to prohibit Trump.
Samour wrote after the ruling, “The decision to bar former President Donald J. Trump — by all accounts the current leading Republican presidential candidate (and reportedly the current leading overall presidential candidate) — from Colorado’s presidential primary ballot flies in the face of the due process doctrine.”
“This can’t possibly be the outcome the framers intended,” he wrote.
