AMES, Iowa — With less than a month to go before voting begins, Donald Trump ‘s Republican rivals are once again rallying to his defense, this time after Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled to remove him from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.
Just as they had following Trump’s successive indictments as he racked up 91 criminal charges, the GOP front-runner’s opponents cast the landmark decision — the first time in history the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate and one the former president has vowed to appeal — as inappropriate, a “stunt” and an “attack on democracy.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis charged the court’s ruling was a plot to ensure Trump wins the nomination because Democrats view him as the weakest Republican candidate.
The court’s ruling once again highlighted a defining dynamic of the GOP primary: While the trail of lawsuits and criminal charges following Trump had been expected to seriously damage his candidacy, they have instead had the opposite effect among Republicans. Primary voters — including many who had been open to backing rival candidates — have rallied around the former president, who has cast himself as the victim of a politically motivated effort by Democratic President Joe Biden and his administration to damage his chief political rival.
O’Malley noted all of the justices on the Colorado court were appointed by Democratic governors. “On its face this is just so plainly partisan that it only helps him,” he said.
Indeed, even former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fierce Trump critic who has blasted the other candidates for being overly deferential to the former president, slammed the ruling as ill-advised.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley told reporters Tuesday that the “last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot.” And entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has cast himself as the heir to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, pledged to withdraw his name from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is allowed on the ballot, and demanded DeSantis, Christie and Haley to do the same.
The Colorado Republican Party, however, said he wouldn’t have to and the party would instead convert their election from a primary to a caucus if the decision is allowed to stand. The party had previously laid out a contingency plan in which delegates would be chosen at an April 6 state convention instead of a March primary, according to a copy provided to The Associated Press.
The Colorado case is one of dozens of lawsuits that have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump from the ballot under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War. Trump had won all of the cases until Tuesday night.
Trump faces four criminal indictments, including one in Washington alleging he illegally sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and fueled the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent the peaceful transition of power.
