By Gregory Korte, Stephanie Lai and Greg Stohr | Bloomberg
Former President Donald Trump’s latest legal woes are threatening to throw the Republican primary contest into chaos just weeks before the party’s voters begin the nominating process with the Iowa caucuses.
Challenges from voters, seeking to keep Trump from running again over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, are likely to end up before the US Supreme Court, with pressure already mounting for the justices to act quickly to quell the legal chaos.
On Thursday, Maine’s top election official moved to remove Trump from the ballot, citing his conduct after the 2020 vote, culminating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Hours later in California, election officials said Trump would stay on their ballot.
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said the ruling in Maine — the second state to bar Trump, following Colorado — set the stage for an “epic constitutional showdown.”
“This puts more pressure on the Supreme Court to act and make a decision,” Waldman said. “There’s a real need for national clarity on this.”
Trump has faced lawsuits from voters across the country who say he is barred from seeking another term by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says a person who “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to support the Constitution is ineligible for office.
The questions about Trump’s eligibility for the White House have failed to dent his commanding lead over the rest of the Republican field. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump with an over 51 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, nationally and well ahead in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Trump campaign has lambasted efforts to bar him as politically motivated and he has insisted he acted within his official duties as president in the run-up to the assault on the Capitol, where his supporters sought to stop lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory.
“We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement after Maine’s ruling.
Path to High Court
The Supreme Court is likely to decide soon whether it will review a Colorado Supreme Court decision that declared Trump ineligible for the ballot there. State Republicans have asked the justices to intervene, and Trump is expected to file his own appeal, which could come as soon as Friday.
Colorado voters seeking to bar Trump have asked the justices to expedite briefing, so they can use a Jan. 5, 2024 private conference to consider granting review.
Even with the high court’s intervention it is unclear how clearly a ruling could resolve the matter.
Waldman said he expects the justices to decide not whether Trump engaged in insurrection, but who has the authority to decide whether such an act bars him from holding office in the future, throwing those decision back in the hands of state courts and election officials.
The legal morass puts Trump’s future in the hands of the justices, three of whom he nominated to the court, dragging the institution into another high-profile political fight at a time when polls show public confidence in the institution near historic lows.
Colorado’s secretary of state on Thursday said Trump would be included as a candidate on the ballot on Jan. 5, unless the Supreme Court declines to take the case or otherwise affirms the state high court’s ruling.
Trump has so far been successful in fending off some challenges, including in crucial swing-state Michigan where the state’s top court said he could remain on the ballot.
Primary Fight
Trump’s Republican rivals have already struggled to present themselves as viable alternatives to the former president while trying to avoid directly attacking him and stoking the anger of his sizable base in the party.
His opponents have defended Trump after indictments in cases over his efforts to overturn the election and over his handling of classified documents — and came to his defense again after Colorado moved to strike him from the ballot.
Past legal challenges have largely bolstered Trump with his own base and the efforts to keep him off the ballot risk rankling voters who want the courts to stay out of the election.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel has also said the party would support Trump’s appeal in the Colorado case. DeSantis called for the Supreme Court to reverse Colorado’s decision in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“We don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions,” former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is rivaling DeSantis as Trump’s runner-up in recent polls, told reporters after the Colorado decision. “I will beat him fair and square.”
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