Trump is cast off the ballot in Maine, too.

But we must not fuel his paranoid persecution narrative

Friends,

Tonight, Maine’s top election official barred Donald J. Trump from the state’s primary election ballot. Maine is the second state, after Colorado, to block his bid for reelection based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

That provision states that:

“No person shall ... hold any office, civil or military, under the United States ... who, having previously taken an oath ... as an officer of the United States ... to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion ...”

In January 2017, when he was sworn in as president, Trump took an oath to support the Constitution. In the weeks after the 2020 election, culminating on January 6, 2021, Trump engaged in an insurrection.

Today, Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, wrote:

“I am mindful that no secretary of state has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

Last week, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled in a 4 to 3 decision that Trump should not be allowed to appear on that state’s Republican primary ballot. (Note that on Wednesday, the Colorado Republican Party appealed that decision. Today, Colorado’s secretary of state said that, with the appeal filed, Trump will be included as a candidate on the state’s primary ballot unless the U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear the case or upholds the state supreme court’s ruling.)

The Republican primaries in Maine and Colorado are both scheduled for March 5, known as Super Tuesday because so many states hold primaries that day — including California, whose top election official is expected to soon announce whether Trump should remain among the candidates certified for the state’s primary.

Another court decision is expected soon out of Oregon in response to the same challenge (after Oregon’s secretary of state declined to remove him).

Courts in Minnesota and Michigan have ruled that election officials in those states cannot prevent the Republican Party in those states from including Trump on their primary ballots.

All told, challenges to Trump’s ballot access have been brought in more than 30 states, mostly through the courts.

The Supreme Court will almost certainly take up the question, and soon.

What will the Supreme Court decide?

To me, it’s crystal clear that Trump violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and should not be allowed to become president again.

But I’m just as sure that the majority of justices on the Supreme Court — six of whom were nominated by Republican presidents, three by Trump himself — will decide that Trump did not violate that provision, and therefore should be allowed on the Republican ballots in all states. (They will find ways to circumvent the wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.)

I fear that this entire drama plays into Trump’s paranoid narrative that he’s being politically persecuted by Democrats. All seven justices on Colorado’s high court were appointed by Democratic governors. Maine’s secretary of state is a Democrat. (By the same token, the Supreme Court majority that presumably will allow Trump back on the ballots were Republican appointees.)

No one is above the law. But the nation must not fuel Trump’s strategy of politicizing attempts to hold him accountable for his insurgency. If the Supreme Court allows him to be the Republican nominee for president, America will have an opportunity to unambiguously defeat the fascist megalomaniac on Election Day 2024.

What do you think?