Colorado Supreme Court rules on Trump 14th Amendment case

A Colorado judge ruled in November that former President Donald Trump “engaged in an insurrection” on January 6, 2021, but rejected an attempt to remove him from the state’s 2024 primary ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban” doesn’t apply to presidents.

The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, says American officials who take an oath to support the Constitution are banned from future office if they “engaged in insurrection.” But the Constitution doesn’t say how to enforce the ban, and it has only been applied twice since 1919 – which is why many experts view these lawsuits as long shots.

The provision explicitly bans insurrectionists from serving as US senators, representatives, and even presidentiall electors – but it does not say anything about presidents. It says it covers “any office, civil or military, under the United States,” and Colorado District Judge Sarah Wallace ruled that this does not include the office of the presidency.

“After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States,’ did not include the President of the United States,” she wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”

The major decision issued by Wallace came after judges in Minnesota and Michigan also refused to remove Trump from that state’s Republican primary ballots. Legal scholars believe these cases will, in some form, end up at the US Supreme Court. But before that, the GOP and independent voters who filed the Colorado lawsuit in coordination with a liberal watchdog group, appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court.

These three high-profile challenges against Trump, which had the backing of well-funded advocacy groups, have so far failed to remove him from a single ballot, with the 2024 primary season fast approaching.

However, the 102-page ruling in Colorado offered a searing condemnation of Trump’s conduct, labeling him as an insurrectionist who “actively primed the anger of his extremist supporters,” and “acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol.”

Wallace concluded that “Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement, and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech” at the Ellipse that day. She also found that Trump “acted with the specific intent to disrupt the Electoral College certification of President Biden’s electoral victory through unlawful means.”