Donald Trump also excluded from the primaries in Maine
President Richard Nixon's former lawyer, John Dean, is convinced that Maine's decision to exclude Donald Trump from the primaries “will be difficult to reverse.” Maine's Secretary of State, former Democratic Senator Shenna Bellows, excluded the primary tycoon, invoking the third section of the 14th Amendment, according to which no public official who, after having sworn by the Constitution, has attacked the Constitution itself, may be legitimized to run again to occupy a public post.
Trump, Bellows wrote in the thirty-four-page justification for his decision, is involved in the insurrection of January 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden's election as president of the United States. The decision is the first adopted unilaterally by a representative of an American public administration and is destined to further inflame the debate in the United States. As the party primaries for the 2024 presidential elections approach, every state is deciding on the legitimacy of Trump, indicted in four trials for attempting to interfere in the 2020 elections, to run again.
In Colorado, on November 19, the state Supreme Court, with a vote of 4-3, excluded the tycoon from the race, referring to the 14th amendment. The four votes in favor are all Democrats. In Wisconsin, two days ago, the Supreme Court rejected a request to exclude Trump from the primaries. In this case the judges deemed the issue too complex to address. The decisions that are accumulating in recent days dramatically mark the countdown of the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington, expected to be pronounced by January 5th, when the ballot papers for the primaries will be printed in Colorado and it will be necessary to understand whether the Trump's name will be considered.
What the highest court in the United States could decide would apply to everyone and would perhaps close the case, avoiding months of further tension. According to Carl Bernstein, one of the two historic journalists of the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's resignation, the one who in the famous film “All the President's Men” was played by Dustin Hoffman, the judges may not decide in the end, but in this way they would deliver America to months of chaos and legal battles. Also because the primaries will intersect with another key event: the trials in which Trump is accused.
An example is Maine: here, in the north-eastern state, the Republican candidates will be chosen on March 5, but the trial should open in Washington DC just the day before, in which the tycoon is accused of trying to block Biden's election. Primaries and trials, trials and primaries: the rallies and hearings could upset the presidential campaign for the first time in American history. The decisions taken by Colorado and Maine put the Supreme Court in a very delicate position: that of becoming an active protagonist in the elections, more than twenty years after the ruling in the stalemate between the candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore, separated by a handful of votes in Florida, which required four weeks of legal battles to count. Steven Cheung, one of Trump's spokesmen, called those in Colorado and Maine “partisan attempts to interfere in elections” and a “hostile attack on American democracy.” But other states are preparing to decide. The next two could be two more Democratic-led: Oregon and California. The use of the 14th amendment, after the Colorado ruling, is no longer a taboo.
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