It would be better to see voters stop former President Donald Trump’s second shot at a second term through an election, than for judges or administrators to do so by removing the 45th president from the ballot, according to the Bay State’s senior U.S. Senator.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, reflecting on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent announcement that they will hear a challenge to the Colorado Supreme Court’s 4 – 3 decision declaring Trump is ineligible to serve as president after his alleged participation in or support of an insurrection against the U.S. government, said that it would be better if the question of his eligibility were left to voters.
“I get it. I think it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump participated in an insurrection,” Warren told WCVB. “But I want to beat him at the ballot box.”
Leaving the question of Trump’s fitness to serve up to voters would remove questions about the outcome of the election, according to the former Harvard Law professor.
“I want to see this resolved at the ballot box because I don’t want there to be any question about the legitimacy of it,” she said.
That’s despite the fact that Trump will declare the results of the 2024 election illegitimate if he loses anyway, she said.
“Of course he will, but it’s not just what he says, it’s what everybody else sees,” Warren said.
Trump, who was also declared ineligible to seek the Republican primary nomination in Maine by that state’s top elections official, currently leads the rest of the conservative field in national polling by more than 50 points.
It’s a position he’s maintained through four grand jury indictments from as many jurisdictions, detailing a total of 91 felony charges leveled against former president. Additionally, courts in New York determined his vast business empire was built upon decades of fraud, and a federal Judge, Lewis Kaplan, made quite clear that though he was not charged with the crime of rape under New York law, he did, in fact, rape author E. Jean Carrol.
Many of the charges the former president faces deal directly with his alleged attempts to maintain his office after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and his actions — or lack thereof — on Jan. 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted the certification of his loss.
The attack on the Capitol, along with an apparent conspiracy to provide the U.S. Congress a slate of fake presidential electors with the aim of falsely claiming Trump won several battleground states, was enough to convince judges in Colorado he violated Section Three of the 14th Amendment.
Passed following the Civil War, the amendment is meant to prevent anyone who engages in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, after swearing an oath to uphold it, from holding office.
Whether Trump’s activities amount to insurrection, or, like he has claimed, were nothing more than a U.S. president following his oath to look into concerns he had about the outcome of the election, or whether the 14th even applies to the U.S. Presidency, are now distinctions left for the nation’s highest court to make.
The justices have scheduled oral arguments on the matter for February 8, weeks after the first primary ballots will be cast.
In the interim, the decision to remove Trump from ballots in Maine and Colorado has been stayed by those jurisdictions.
