OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump wasted no time responding after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to remove him from the 2024 ballot, citing the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment.
In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump responded fire and fury to the ruling as well as others from several legal experts and commentators.
“This country is a powder keg, and this court is just throwing matches at it…for people that say they are trying to protect democracy, this is hands down the most anti-democratic opinion I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Georgetown University law school professor and constitutional expert Jonathan Turley said.
“Seeing what happened in Colorado tonight…makes me think—except we believe in democracy in Texas—maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick added.
“This is ELECTION RIGGING…This is an effort, make no mistake, to deprive American voters of their right to make the decision as to who should be president. It is anti-democratic. It’s the equivalent of rigging the ballot box,” Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said.
“They don’t want the voters to decide this…there is obviously this deep fear of Donald Trump potentially winning the White House back,” Ned Ryun, the founder and CEO of the conservative American Majority organization.
“Democrats in Colorado are so afraid of allowing American voters to vote and pick the next president they are willing to do extra-judicial things in order to thwart the people’s choice from being on the ballot,” Fox contributor Charlie Hurt added. “To them, preserving democracy requires destroying democracy.”
In a subsequent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Turley said of the ruling: “It is a strikingly anti-democratic holding, in my view. The court literally faced a series of interpretive barriers to get to where it ended up. It adopted the most sweeping, broadest possible interpretation to get over every one of those hurdles. So throughout this opinion, it had to adopt interpretations that could encompass a wide array of statements.”
“They used what’s called true threat precedent to show that you can view what Trump said as encouraging an insurrection by looking at stuff that he said at other times. And that, of course, allowed them to reach this conclusion. In my view, the court is dead wrong,” he added, before adding that similar theories had already been rejected by other Democrat-appointed judges.
“I think the opinion is really chilling, and I think that the Supreme Court will make fast work of this theory; I hope it does,” Turley said.
Ingraham, who is an attorney herself, responded: “And there have been other rulings in other state supreme courts, correct? Or federal courts that have come to the opposite conclusion here. So this is an outlier, which, again, because of what’s at stake, it’s going to have to be expedited to the court, the Supreme Court.”
“Yeah, when you read this opinion, the one thing that keeps on recurring in your mind is: ‘Where is the limiting principle here?’” Turley offered. “What would not satisfy this test? At each one of these barriers, the court could have adopted a fairly moderate or more narrow approach. But it didn’t. And so, on every one of these issues, it really took out all the fail-safes and went to the broadest possible meaning.
“Well, that means that states could engage in a tit-for-tat type of series of decisions. You know, you could have red states blocking Biden on some ballots and blue states blocking Trump,” he predicted. “And the way this is viewed by the public is really quite horrific. You know, they view President Biden on the ropes, and the ref just called the match.”
