Do you know how close we came to living under a military dictatorship? Not only did Trump specifically tell everyone to take over the capital but he had this nation's military ready to jump in and overthrow Congress and seize American's streets. I personally had set up an underground bomb shelter complete with 3 month supply of food and 5,000 live rounds of ammunition.
Just kidding...I didn't think I'd be living in a Banana Republic.
Of course, Maine's action will simply rally more support for Mr Mean and easily get overturned by the US Supreme Court. I guess all the Dems are determined to get this idiot elected.
Maine Becomes Second State to Bar Trump From 2024 Primary Ballot
Maine’s secretary of state cites the Capitol riot in her decision, but California includes Trump on the list of candidates for its primary
By Jacob Gershman, WSJ
Updated Dec. 29, 2023
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said former President Donald Trump is ineligible to serve again because of his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Maine’s top election official Thursday barred Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, the second time a state knocked the Republican former president off its ballot and escalating a national legal effort to disqualify him from office.
In a 34-page written decision, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said the Constitution bars a second Trump term because of his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol following his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Her decision, in which she found “he is not qualified to hold the office of the President,” comes after Colorado’s highest court ruled last week that Trump is ineligible for that state’s ballot. Both rulings invoked the same section of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment that disqualifies from public office those who swore to defend the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S.
In California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber late Thursday included Trump on the list of candidates for the state’s March 5 primary, despite facing pressure to reject his candidacy.
In Maine, eligibility challenges are first adjudicated administratively. The secretary of state’s ruling, which she issued after holding a public hearing, marks the first time that a state election authority has excluded the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner from a primary ballot.
In her decision, Bellows said Trump “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters” to “prevent a peaceful transfer of power.” She accused him of engaging in “incendiary rhetoric” and failing to take timely action to stop the assault on the Capitol.
“The weight of the evidence makes clear that Mr. Trump was aware of the tinder laid by his multi-month effort to delegitimize a democratic election, and then chose to light a match,” she wrote.
Trump has denied engaging in an insurrection and has accused his political opponents of trying to disenfranchise voters with dubious legal arguments.
A Trump campaign spokesman, responding to Bellows’s decision, said it was the election official herself who was guilty of “a hostile assault on American democracy,” calling her “a virulent leftist.”
The spokesman said the campaign would “quickly file a legal objection in state court to prevent this atrocious decision in Maine from taking effect.”
Anti-Trump voters have challenged Trump’s ballot eligibility in dozens of states through lawsuits and administrative petitions. Several Maine residents, including former state senators, brought challenges against Trump.
The former president has prevailed in a handful of early decisions in other states, including a Michigan court ruling this week rejecting a similar bid to keep him off the ballot in the battleground state. Election officials in several other states, including Democrats in Massachusetts and Oregon, have said they wouldn’t kick Trump off the ballot without a court order.
The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to be the final arbiter on these cases. Colorado Republicans on Wednesday asked justices to reverse the state’s first-of-its-kind judicial ruling, and Trump is expected to file his own appeal.
The Colorado ruling, the Republican petition stated, “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the…electoral process throughout the country.”
Maine and Colorado are both holding their presidential primaries on March 5 as part of Super Tuesday and are required to send out ballots to overseas and military voters weeks before then.
Congress drafted Section 3 during Reconstruction to prevent Confederates who rose up in arms against the Union from seizing back power through the ballot box.
Until Jan. 6, 2021, the provision was regarded as a Civil War remnant, largely forgotten and seldom litigated. After the Capitol riot, it got a fresh look from constitutional scholars, including some prominent conservative legal academics who have concluded that it can and should be enforced against Trump.
In Maine, Trump’s lawyers argued that the eligibility challenges go beyond the secretary of state’s authority. State law, his lawyers wrote, limits such claims to more mundane questions about a candidate’s residence and party designation.
State authorities in general aren’t empowered to enforce Section 3 without legislation from Congress authorizing such lawsuits, his lawyers said. They also contend that Section 3 may not be applied to a former president.
And they dispute that Trump actually engaged in an insurrection. Some legal scholars say that requires proof that Trump engaged in the attack, not just encouraged or aided it.
Trump is facing a federal trial on charges related to efforts to overturn the November 2020 election, but he has never been criminally charged with engaging in insurrection, a federal crime. Trump is also facing charges stemming from his 2020 loss in Georgia, where a local prosecutor has used a state racketeering law to allege Trump and others engaged in a “criminal enterprise” to subvert democracy. Trump has pleaded not guilty in the federal and Georgia cases.
Rep. Jared Golden (D., Maine), posting on X after the Maine decision Thursday, said that while he voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6, “until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.”
The Trump campaign earlier this week demanded that Bellows recuse herself from the matter, describing the former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine as a partisan who is “incapable of making a fair decision.” Trump’s lawyers cited social-media posts that she wrote lamenting the U.S. Senate’s vote in 2021 to acquit Trump on the charge he incited an insurrection at the Capitol.
“The Jan. 6 insurrection was an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election,” Bellows wrote in a Feb. 13, 2021, posting. “Today 57 senators including King & Collins found Trump guilty. That’s short of impeachment but nevertheless an indictment. The insurrectionists failed, and democracy prevailed.”
Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com
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