And Maine said no. The Secretary of State of that northeastern territory of the country, Shenna Bellows, decided this Thursday that Donald Trump cannot run in the primaries in that State. Bellows interprets that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which incorporates a “disqualification” clause for anyone who has participated in a “rebellion or insurrection”, prevents this.
The decision comes after the Colorado Supreme Court decided last week that the former president is not authorized to run in the primaries there either. The high court of Michigan, one of the most disputed states, decided, for its part, this Wednesday that it could do so. Five others, including Arizona, Florida and New Hampshire, have rejected similar lawsuits that seek to disqualify Trump from his aspiration to return to the White House in November 2024.
The final word on whether or not he or she is suitable to run for office will be the Washington Supreme Court. The decision made by the highest judicial body in the country, with a conservative majority and three judges appointed by Trump, will have effect on all 50 States.
Bellows, who is a Democrat, justified his resolution in writing by appealing to Trump's role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. “I am aware that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of access to the polls based on the third section of the fourteenth amendment. However, I am also aware that no presidential candidate has ever participated in an insurrection before,” Bellows argued in a 34-page document in which he states: “The United States Constitution does not tolerate an attack on the foundations of our government.” .
The Constitution sets the conditions for aspiring to the presidency to be a US citizen, to be over 35 years old and to have resided in the country for the last 14. It is not expressly prohibited for someone investigated for a federal crime (not even if, as in the Trump case, faces 91 charges, in four separate cases). He also wouldn't be eliminated from the race if he were found guilty or even if he ended up in jail.
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. It sanctioned the equality of all people before the law and granted citizenship to slaves. Its third section was designed to prevent the Confederate rebels from holding public office again. It has been applied on rare occasions; only two since 1919.
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The clause, which has been placed at the center of a bitter political-legal debate in this final stretch of the year, says: “No person may be a senator or congressman, an elector of the president or vice president, or hold any civil or military position, if , having previously taken an oath of support for the Constitution of the United States, has participated in an insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to its enemies.”
Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State consider that what Trump did both in the previous months and on January 6, 2021, the day he called a demonstration in Washington that ended in an attack on the Capitol, is a act of insurrection and that the speech with which he inflamed the masses that day is not protected by the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression.
Both also understand that this prohibition can be applied to the position of president. And that is another of the extremes of the constitutional text open to interpretation: Trump's lawyers defend that the president is not an official of the United States and that his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” is not the same as that of support it that describes the fourteenth amendment.
The decision of the Michigan Supreme Court did not enter into the matter, and simply said: “We are not convinced that the issues presented should be reviewed by this court.”
The tycoon's legal team has five days to appeal to a Maine superior court against Bellows' decision, which it has described as “atrocious.”
The primaries in Maine, a state that tends to vote Democratic, are part of the great event known as Super Tuesday, which will be held on March 5. It is the decisive day to choose a candidate in both parties, given that the voting coincides in a large number of states. Trump comfortably dominates the race for the Republican nomination, where no one, not Nikki Haley nor Ron DeSantis, the two best-placed candidates, seems capable of overshadowing him.
Given Maine's particular system, which allows electoral votes to be divided, the magnate took one from this State in the 2016 and 2020 elections. To be president of the United States it is necessary to obtain 270 of those votes.
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