Colorado secretary of state asks US Supreme Court to uphold Trump disqualification ruling

Colorado’s top elections official asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a state court ruling barring former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot under a Civil War-era insurrection clause.

The brief filed this week by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is the last to be filed by the main parties to the historic disqualification case, following earlier filings from Trump, the Colorado Republican Party and the six Republican and unaffiliated voters who sued to keep the GOP frontrunner off the ballot, based on his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Petitioner Trump challenges Colorado’s constitutional prerogative to exclude ineligible candidates from its ballots,” Griswold’s brief argues. “But just as Colorado cannot be forced to place on its presidential primary ballot a naturalized citizen, a minor, or someone twice elected to the presidency, it also should not be forced to include a candidate found by its courts to have violated his oath to support the Constitution by engaging in insurrection.”

The six plaintiffs in the case, backed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed their lawsuit in Denver District Court in September. They alleged that certifying Trump’s candidacy for Colorado’s March 5 presidential primary would violate Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits a person who took an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again.

Griswold, a Democrat, took no formal position on Trump’s eligibility during a five-day trial in district court, or during the plaintiffs’ appeal of the case to the Colorado Supreme Court in December. But following the state Supreme Court’s seismic Dec. 19 ruling, in which a four-justice majority held that Trump is disqualified, Griswold has said the court “got it right.”

In the wake of the Colorado ruling, Maine became the second state to bar Trump from the ballot under Section 3 when Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued a ruling to that effect on Dec. 28. Similar challenges have been rejected in several states and are still pending in at least a dozen others. The Colorado case is widely expected to produce a precedent-setting ruling from the nation’s highest court, with many parties on both sides of the aisle urging the court’s 6-3 conservative majority to issue a “decisive” or “final” decision that settles the question of Section 3 litigation against Trump once and for all.

Colorado was singled out as a “good venue” for such a challenge in part because of provisions in its election code that specifically prohibit elections officials from certifying the candidacy of a person who is ineligible to assume the office they’re seeking. Such laws, Griswold’s brief to the Supreme Court says, “ensure voters are not disenfranchised” by wasting their vote on an ineligible candidate.

“This, in turn, allows voters to accurately weigh their choices before casting a vote,” the brief states. “And, perhaps most importantly, it avoids the turmoil of an ineligible candidate winning an election for an office that the candidate is constitutionally barred from holding.”

In a separate filing on Jan. 26, Griswold requested additional time during oral argument before the court “to allow her to address the unique state-law and state-level election-administration issues presented in this matter.” Under her request, Griswold would be granted 15 minutes to present oral argument in addition to the 30 minutes each already allotted to Trump and the plaintiffs.

“The Secretary has a unique and crucial interest in this matter, one not otherwise addressed by the other parties,” the filing argued.

But in a response filed this week, the plaintiffs — a group including Norma Anderson, a former Republican majority leader in the Colorado state Senate — wrote that they “respectfully submit that undivided argument would be most appropriate and beneficial to the Court.”

“The Secretary makes no arguments on the core issues in this case: Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6 and whether Section 3 applies to him,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “The Anderson Respondents address those issues, as well as the state law issues that the Secretary seeks to advance.”