(Headline USA) Maine’s leftist secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take action unilaterally as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Trump remains eligible to continue his campaign.
The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
That decision has been stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump is barred by the Civil War-era provision, which prohibits those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows’s decision to Maine’s state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case. In the end, it is likely that the nation’s highest court will have the final say on whether Trump appears on the ballot there and in the other states.
Bellows found that Trump could no longer run for his prior job because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol violated Section 3, which bans from office those who “engaged in insurrection.”
Bellows made the ruling after some state residents, including a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, challenged Trump’s position on the ballot.
“I do not reach this conclusion lightly,” Bellows claimed 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,” she continued. “I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”
Trump has not been convicted of an insurrection, and the subjective claims from partisan leftists do not fit the traditional description of an “insurrection” despite three years of leftist gaslighting to that effect.
Of the 91 criminal charges that corrupt leftist prosecutors have filed against the GOP frontrunner, none involve anything related to an insurrection.
The Trump campaign immediately slammed the ruling. “We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
Thursday’s ruling demonstrates the need for the nation’s highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3, to clarify what states can do.
“It is clear that these decisions are going to keep popping up, and inconsistent decisions reached … until there is final and decisive guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the leftist University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. “It seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later.”
While Maine has just four electoral votes, it’s one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine’s electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there, should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate, could have meaningful implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.
That’s in contrast to Colorado, which Trump lost by 13 percentage points in 2020 and where he wasn’t expected to compete in November if he wins the Republican presidential nomination.
In her decision, Bellows acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have the final word but said it was important she did her official duty.
The Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she’d previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.
“My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night.
The lawfare suits are being waged by radical left-wing activist groups, some of which receive funding from globalist oligarch George Soros. Leading the charge are the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Free Speech for People.
Bellows herself has an activist background as the former head of the Maine chapter of the far-left American Civil Liberties Union.
All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats.
That’s led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign.
Likewise, until Bellows’s decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn’t have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
