Yeah, About That Write-In Idea for Trump in Colorado

The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Colorado Supreme Court's 4-3 decision to destroy democracy!™ in order to save it by keeping the leading Republican candidate off the 2024 presidential ballot should be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, if there is justice in the land. That's an iffy proposition. Remember that it was John Roberts's Supreme Court that failed to take up the case of Pennsylvania illegally changing its voting laws in the 2020 election. John Roberts and the liberal wing of the court could throw Donald Trump under the electoral bus again. But as we've seen in the opinion, the Colorado Supreme Court has also cut off another avenue for Trump's candidacy.

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There is one underappreciated aspect of this case in this chapter of post-constitutional America. Trump's supporters will not be allowed to write him in on their ballots because the court said he was "unqualified" to hold office and therefore can't be a write-in candidate. 

We perceive no logical distinction between a disqualification from office and a qualification to assume office, at least for the purposes of the section 1-1-113 claim here. Either way, it would be a wrongful act for the Secretary to list a candidate on the presidential primary ballot who is not “qualified” to assume the duties of the office. Moreover, because Section Three is a “part of the text of the Constitution,” assessing a candidate’s compliance with it for purposes of determining their eligibility for office does not improperly “add qualifications to those that appear in the Constitution.” U.S. Term Limits, 514 U.S. at 787 n.2. Doing so merely renders the list of constitutional qualifications more complete.

See? They fixed it. But wait, there's more of the "logical distinction" talk. Stay with us. It goes something like this: if we decide he's unqualified, and, even if a candidate is a political party's choice, the candidate still may not be on the ballot even as a write-in.

Here, the Election Code limits presidential primary ballot access to only qualified candidates. Such a restriction is an “eminently reasonable” regulation that does not severely burden CRSCC’s associational rights. To hold otherwise would permit political parties to disregard the requirements of the law and the Constitution whenever they decide, as a matter of “political expression” or“political choice,” that those requirements do not apply. That cannot be. The Constitution—not any political party rule—is the supreme law of the land. 

[...] Accordingly, we conclude that because President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary to list President Trump as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. Therefore, the Secretary may not list PresidentTrump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, nor may she count any write-in votes cast for him.

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Related: The Big BUT in Colorado's Trump Election Decision

The left is loving the chaos caused by this novel use of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

Be careful what you wish for, lefties.

While novel, the lawfare arm of the Democrat Party has been planning this for a long time. 

Looking back to HR-1 and HR-4, first trotted out by Nancy Pelosi in her latest iteration as speaker, the bill would have nationalized elections, which are explicitly run by the states in our system of federalism. 

The bill would have created the "first-ever public financing of congressional campaigns, gutted voter ID laws, legalized ballot harvesting nationwide, weaponized the FEC, limited free speech protections for Americans, and nationalized our elections," as Ranking Member of the House Administration Elections Subcommittee Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) put it. In other words, those bills would have codified everything that went wrong in the 2020 election. 

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Colorado's novel application of the 14th Amendment creates yet another way to determine at scale the peculiar ways one can create what qualifies or disqualifies a candidate from being chosen by his or her party to stand for office. 

Trump's is not the only speech the left wants to criminalize and censor. They're coming for conservative media, too. They demonize, demonetize, and hope to demoralize PJ Media writers by coming for our bottom lines. Screw 'em. 

There's a way around their censorious shenanigans and it's by becoming a PJ Media VIP member and cutting those anti-American bastards completely out. 

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