Voters challenging former President Donald Trump’s eligibility to return
to the White House told the Supreme Court Friday that Trump is
attempting to sidestep the evidence that he stoked the attack on the
Capitol three years ago.

“The thrust of Trump’s position is less legal than it is political. He
not-so-subtly threatens ‘bedlam’ if he is not on the ballot,” attorneys
for the Colorado voters wrote in a 70-page filing submitted Friday. “But
we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot
and lost.”

The 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, the lawyers continued, “is
designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like
Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again.”

The court will hear oral arguments in the case on Feb. 8.

Trump’s detractors say his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack disqualifies
him from appearing on the ballot based on the Civil War-era
constitutional amendment, which bars people from holding federal office
if they “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to support the
Constitution.

In his own Supreme Court brief last week, the lawyers for the voters
note, Trump didn’t dispute that the Jan. 6 attack itself was an
insurrection. And they say he made only a “perfunctory” attempt to
disclaim his role in it.

Rather, they contend, Trump spent the bulk of his argument suggesting
that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to presidential candidates and
that his exhortations to the Jan. 6 crowd he summoned to Washington were
protected free speech.

“For obvious reasons, the First Amendment does not protect mob bosses
who deliberately incite violence through thinly veiled language they
know their audience will understand,” the lawyers for the voters say.
“So too here.”

The case is an appeal of a decision from the Colorado Supreme Court,
which ruled in December that Trump is ineligible to run. The justices
agreed to consider Trump’s appeal on an expedited basis.

The Colorado decision was the first in the nation finding that Trump was
ineligible, and Maine’s secretary of state made a similar decision
shortly after. But Trump is likely to appear on at least the primary
ballot in both states. Earlier this month, a Maine court put the
secretary’s ruling on hold pending a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court,
while the Colorado court effectively paused its decision immediately to
let the nation’s top court weigh in.

In the filing Friday, attorneys representing the voters — including from
the liberal government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics
in Washington, which has spearheaded similar challenges across the
country — argued that Trump has “no serious defense” against the
allegation that he “engaged in insurrection.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/trump-ballot-eligibility-challengers-00138118

Just another threat to democracy. HawHawHaw!