Judicial Watch Statement on Unanimous Supreme Court Ruling on Trump Ballot Dispute

 (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the Supreme Court ruling allowing Donald Trump’s eligibility on the 2024 Colorado primary ballot.

The United States Supreme Court today made a powerful and unified statement against the brazen, unconstitutional coup by leftists against the constitutional rights of tens of millions of Americans. And, thankfully, a Supreme Court majority seems prepared to stop any shady Biden administration and leftist congressional efforts to overturn a Trump victory based on false allegations of insurrection.

In January, Judicial Watch filed an amici curiae (friend of the court) brief along with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) in support of former President Donald Trump in his challenge to the Colorado Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision to remove him from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot (Donald J. Trump v. Norma Anderson et al. (No. 23-719)).

Judicial Watch and AEF argued that, if the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling was allowed to stand, presidential and other federal elections would be thrown into chaos:

In a basically standardless legal discussion, charges of insurrection can be levelled by imaginative partisans on the basis of many different kinds of inflammatory political actions or speech. Consider:

1. Vice President Kamala Harris promoted a bail fund that helped to free “those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The protests in 20 states following that murder were among the costliest in U.S. history, persisting in some cities for months, and resulting in at least 25 deaths. Protesters attacked federal property and set fire to a federal courthouse. Protests also caused President Trump to evacuate the White House to a secure underground location, as rioters assaulted police officers outside the White House gates.

2. Discussing an anticipated abortion ruling, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told a rally on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 5, 2020, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” His comments were reproved by the Chief Justice of this Court as “dangerous.” Two years later a man was arrested for threatening behavior directed at Justice Kavanaugh.

3. Recently a number of Republican officials have proposed retaliating for the instant lawsuit by seeking to remove President Biden from their state ballots for abetting an “invasion of eight million” at the southern border of the United States.

4. On June 10, 2017, Sen. Bernie Sanders called President Trump “the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country.” Four days later, one of his supporters opened fire on congressional Republicans at a baseball practice, wounding four, including Rep. Steve Scalise.

All of these facts are fodder for interested partisans seeking to disqualify opposing candidates. If the nation does go “down that path,” presidential elections in the United States will become a more ugly business. Legal maneuvers to remove President Trump from the ballots of various states, and the retaliatory maneuvers they provoke, will create a new, anti-democratic front in the partisan wars. To be blunt, “blue states” will apply Section 3 to harass “red” candidates, while “red states” will apply that provision to harass “blue” candidates.

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 The losers in this process, as here, will be the voters.

 The Court should foreclose this kind of warfare now. Amici respectfully submit that the Court should refuse to ratify these maneuvers, and should instead adopt as its policy the observation that “[t]he cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.”

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