The legal maneuvers to remove former President Donald Trump from states’ GOP primary ballot is no different from when liberal activists successfully used the courts to change election laws before the 2020 presidential election, according to GOP lawmakers.
Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida and Jerry Carl of Alabama are accusing Democrats and their allies of conspiring to remove Mr. Trump from at least a dozen states’ ballots to throw the 2024 campaigns into chaos.
“This is what happened before the 2020 election,” Mr. Donalds told Fox News. “They were in court everywhere trying to get things like these drop boxes in every municipality in the country, saying that it was too hard to vote because the COVID-19.
“People needed to drop it in a receptacle outside the building. That was a joke and a lie. It is not needed, but they do this every single time because they want to weaken the infrastructure of voting.”
Mr. Carl called the Democrats’ ballot strategy “new COVID for 2024.”
“In 2020, they had us locked down,” Mr. Carls said in a separate appearance on Fox News. “We couldn’t get out and vote. We could do all this absentee voting. Everything was built around fear. So now the new fear and what the Democrat Party is trying to do here is to tear Trump down and say he’s unqualified to run for this office, that is not their job to determine that.”
He added, “The courts got us in this mess. We can’t depend on the federal government to bail us out … No one has the right to be taken off a ballot because a Secretary of State or someone in a position thinks they can do it. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Maine’s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday unilaterally removed Mr. Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot citing the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause, becoming the second state to do so.
The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was the first time a state election official has barred Mr. Trump from running. Her decision follows a 4-3 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr. Trump from the state’s March 5 GOP primary, also citing the insurrection clause.
The Colorado decision has been stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Mr. Trump is prohibited by the Civil War-era provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bans those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
“I do not reach this conclusion lightly,” Ms. Bellows wrote in her 34-page decision. “I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection,” she said.
The moves to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot stem from his ties to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Trump campaign said it would appeal Ms. Bellows’ decision through Maine’s state court system.
However, the nation’s highest court likely will have the final say on whether Mr. Trump appears on the ballot there and in the other states.
Liberal activists from organizations across the country have called on state and local election officials to keep Mr. Trump off the ballots. They often cite a New Mexico judge who removed an Otero County Commissioner in September 2022 over his participation in the Capitol riot and ruled that the attack was an insurrection.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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