AP Photo/Cliff Owen
The shocking decision by the Colorado Supreme Court Tuesday that aims to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot for the GOP presidential primary in the state sent shockwaves across the world as angry critics continue to slam the opinion and argue that real democracies don’t work this way.
RedState’s Sister Toldjah brought you reactions earlier from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and more:
Meanwhile, entrepreneur and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy challenged his GOP rivals to effectively boycott the Colorado primary if the decision stands:
Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, also a presidential candidate and no fan of Donald Trump, slammed the opinion:
Now RFK Jr. weighed in Tuesday evening, pointing out that we call countries that play these kinds of political games undemocratic.
Speaking of foreign countries, El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele ripped us over our hypocrisy, posting to X, "The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about “democracy.”
The president of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, wrote a long post pointing out that we've stooped to the level of countries we used to excoriate; here's his conclusion:
The Democratic court majority, based solely on its partisan hatred of Trump, ruled to deprive countless Colorado voters who support Trump of the right to vote for the candidate of their choice for president. What an outrage!
What has happened in Colorado would not be out of place in Russia, Iran, China or Venezuela: a summary kangaroo court proceeding to lawlessly bar a disfavored political opponent from office. The US Supreme Court can't act soon enough to tamp down this act of judicial sedition.
RedState's Nick Arama earlier brought you the story of the Trump campaign's angry written statement, but he also referenced all the Democrat legal shenanigans at a Commit to Caucus event in Iowa Tuesday night.
Trump's former acting director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell also noted that banana republic stunts like this hurt our credibility across the globe. "The Pakistani high courts and the Colorado Supreme Court have both thrown the ruling party’s opponents off the ballots," he posted.
Of course, in our divided nation, you knew not all the reaction would be negative -- over at the Huffpost they're laughing and gloating about the opinion, seemingly not aware that they're gleeful about tearing down our constitutional system just because they hate Trump so much. As has become the standard, they themselves are actively doing what they accuse the other side of -- endangering democracy.
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Jonathan Turley Rips Apart the Colorado Decision Booting Trump Off the Ballot
By Nick Arama | RedStatel.com
Bonnie Cash/Pool via AP
The folks trying to push the 14th Amendment agenda to get former President Donald Trump booted off ballots finally met with success on Tuesday with the Colorado Supreme Court decision holding he couldn't be on that state's presidential primary ballot.
The court, with judges all appointed by Democratic governors, was immediately shredded, including by the candidates opposing Trump. Vivek Ramaswamy said he would withdraw his name. Even Chris Christie busted it as denying the people the right to vote for the candidate of their choice. The Trump campaign blasted the undemocratic nature of the move.
They want to take Trump off the ballot for "insurrection" over Jan. 6, yet it is truly they who are, right in front of our faces, interfering in the election and suppressing the right of people to vote.
Now, George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley is weighing in, noting this decision comes from "one of the bluest state supreme courts in the land." Even then, the Court was still split, four to three. It was a case of first impression, meaning there was no case having dealt with this before, so there's no black-letter law to rely upon.
Yet, the lack of precedent or clarity did not deter these justices from making new law to block Trump from running. Indeed, the most controlling precedent appears to be what might be called the Wilde Doctrine.
In his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” The four Colorado justices just ridded themselves of the ultimate temptation and, in so doing, put this country on one of the most dangerous paths in its history.
The purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the “disqualification clause” — was to bar Confederates.
Turley said Jan. 6 was many things, "However, it was not an insurrection." He said, "It was a protest that became a riot, not a rebellion." He noted how Special Counsel Jack Smith didn't believe he had the basis to pursue such a charge of incitement or insurrection.
In such a case, you usually would have a narrow interpretation, but Turley believes they "removed all the fail-safes" to stretch this to fit Trump and block him.
There were a number of barriers facing advocates who have tried to stretch this provision to cover the January 6 riot. The four justices had to adopt the most sweeping interpretation possible on every one of those questions in order to support their decision.
The only narrow part of the opinion came with the interpretation of the First Amendment, where the four justices dismissed the free-speech implications of disqualifying presidential candidates based on political position and rhetoric.
The result is an opinion that lacks any limiting principles. It places the nation on a slippery slope where red and blue states could now engage in tit-for-tat disqualifications. According to the Colorado Supreme Court, those decisions do not need to be based on the specific comments made by figures like Trump. Instead, it ruled, courts can now include any statements made before or after a speech to establish a "true threat.”
So not only have they extended this provision far beyond what it was ever intended to cover, but they're stepping all over the First Amendment in the process and have now opened the door to the use of it to take out other candidates in the future in tit-for-tat removals. It poses a serious danger to the very nature of our elections and our Republic.
The Democrats are constantly talking about threats to Democracy. Yet, here is a real threat to democracy.
The Colorado Supreme Court has handed down the most anti-democratic opinion in decades. What is particularly galling is that these four justices stripped away the right of millions of voters to choose their preferred candidate in the name of democracy. It is like burning down a house in the name of fire safety.
The only good news is that this flawed theory can now be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where it is likely to be put to rest conclusively.
Turley notes how this comes at a time when Democrats are openly concerned about Biden's chances and Trump is beating him handily in polls, including with the young.
For those voters, the Colorado ruling looks like a case of Biden being on the ropes when the referee just called the bout in his favor. Even if, as expected, these justices are reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, many Americans will not forget what they will consider to be an effort to take away their vote. While these four justices offered their "first impression" in this dangerous opinion, the lasting impression of many voters is not likely to be good for the court or for Democrats.
But Democrats don't care about burning down the house; they care about power and control, and everything must fall if it stands in their way. And they wonder why Trump is so soundly beating Biden in the polls. The voters already know what's on the ballot here and how Biden must not win.
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WATCH: Even Chris Christie Is Casting the Stink Eye on Court Keeping Trump off Ballot
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By Judd Garrett
Yesterday, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled to take the Republican presidential frontrunner, Donald Trump off its state’s ballot because of his involvement in the so-called “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, at the United States Capital. They based their ruling on the “insurrection” clause of 14th Amendment of our Constitution. It didn’t matter to the court that Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capital that was turned down by both Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor, Marilyn Bowser. It didn’t matter that no one at the Capital was armed. They did not consider that there were FBI assets in the crowd, stirring up trouble to incite the riot. And they didn’t factor in that when Trump was impeached for his involvement on January 6, he was found not guilty.
If you were planning an insurrection, you would not offer 10,000 armed soldiers to protect the place where the insurrection was to occur, but if you wanted to create a false flag insurrection to weaponize against your opponent, you would turn down the protection of 10,000 armed troops and help incite a riot. This has been all part of the plan for the last 3 years. The events at the Capital were characterized as an “insurrection” by many Democrats and many in the mainstream media within minutes of the riot breaking out. The media was parroting the word “insurrection” as if they were all given the same talking points. The word “insurrection” was chosen specifically because it is in the 14th Amendment and can be used to prevent a candidate from running for office. That was the plan – steal the election from Trump in 2020, put FBI agents in the crowd during a protest of that stolen election to incite a riot at the Capital, so you can immediately call it an “insurrection” so you can label Trump an insurrectionist, and then use the insurrection narrative to get Trump off the ballot in 2024.
You have to be a crazy conspiracy theorist to believe the Democrats would do all that. Let’s review what the Democrats are capable of – these are all facts. In 2016, using a fraudulent dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Barack Obama and his intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump’s campaign, his transition, and his presidency, lying to the FISA courts to get that authorization. And then after Trump won the Presidency, the intelligence agencies used the fraudulent dossier as grounds to open a 2½ year Special Counsel investigation into Donald Trump, claiming that he colluded with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election so they could impeach him and throw him out of office. Even though there was not a shred of evidence produced that supported that charge, it was repeated endlessly by the mainstream media and Democrat politicians.
Donald Trump was impeached in 2019 because he made a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asking him to look into possible corruption committed by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. In 2020, the corruption that Trump asked Zelenskyy to look into and was impeached over, was proven to be true when the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop came to light. The FBI had the contents of that laptop for over a year and they had it during Trump’s impeachment but never brought that exculpatory evidence to light because they wanted Trump convicted and thrown out of office. And after the New York Post broke the story of the laptop in 2020, 50 current and former intelligence agents, all signed a letter falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, so it would be suppressed in the media and not negatively impact Biden in the upcoming election.
During the 2020 election cycle, members of our intelligence agencies and Democrat politicians met with the Big Tech companies Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social-media platforms and pressured them to censor right-leaning information that they didn’t like being spread on these highly-influential social media sites. Far left-wing multibillionaire and private citizen, Mark Zuckerberg donated $400 million to run the elections in the six battleground states, that all ended up going to Joe Biden which handed him the election. Many of these battleground states had their election laws changed unconstitutionally by Democrat judges, Governors or the Secretaries of State, circumventing Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of our Constitutional which only allows the state legislators to change state election laws. These Democrat judges, Governors or the Secretaries of State opened their state elections up to fraud by implementing universal mail-in ballots, no voter ID, no signature match, unsecured drop boxes to collect the ballots with no verifiable chain of custody, all without the approval of their state legislatures.
And the result was that Joe Biden – who barely campaigned, who can’t string together to coherent sentences, who hid in his basement for nine months, and who couldn’t get more than 20 people to show up to a rally – won every single battleground state, and received 11 million more votes than any other candidate in the history of our country. On election night, Democrat run precincts in battleground states stopped counting the vote when Trump was leading by sizable margins, only to restart the counting hours later with Joe Biden miraculously in the lead.
Since the 2020 election, Donald Trump has been impeached. He has been indicted over 90 times from four different Democrat run jurisdictions, the FBI has raided his Mar-a-Lago home, and now states, like Colorado, are taking his name off the ballot because he questioned the results of the 2020 election. Al Gore challenge results the 2000 election all the way up to the Supreme Court, nothing happened to him. In 2004, John Kerry charged that the Dominion voting machines in Ohio had changed votes for him to Bush. Hillary Clinton to this day still maintains that Donald Trump stole the election from her in 2016. Back in 1960, John F. Kennedy was allowed to challenge and overturn the results of the Hawaiian presidential election that was initially called for Nixon. Donald Trump is the only political candidate in the history of America, who, when he challenged the results of an election, was accused of trying to overthrow the government.
I don’t know how the Democrats can claim to be protecting democracy when everything that they have been doing in this election cycle destroys democracy. The Democrats took Robert F Kennedy Jr off of their primary ballots in several states which forced him to run as an independent because if he is not on the ballot, he no longer had a chance to win the Democrat nomination. The Democrats, who continually remind us how important democracy is, have rigged it so no one can challenge Joe Biden in their 2024 primary election. The Democrats rigged their primaries in 2016 and 2020 against popular candidate Bernie Sanders. The Democrats can no longer talk about the importance of democracy or defending democracy or Trump’s a threat to democracy when everything that they’ve done since 2016 has been to thwart our democratic process and to rig our elections in their favor. And now, the Democrats believe that the best way to prove that our democracy is safe and secure, and our elections are not being stolen is to actually steal an election in plain sight.
What Joe Biden has been doing at our southern border is further proof of their desire to destroy our democratic system. The 7 million illegal immigrants who Biden has allowed into this country over the last three years, if enfranchised with the vote, will vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats. Biden is essentially stuffing the ballot box with illegal immigrants. Donald Trump is not allowed on the ballot, but the guy who is purposely enabling an all-out invasion into our country of millions of illegal foreign nationals, including MS-13 gang members, drug cartels, criminal aliens, and thousands of terrorists, is allowed on the ballot.
The Democrats have done all of this under the guise of “protecting our democracy”. So, I guess the best way to protect our elections is by rigging the next election by removing their most popular political opponent from the ballot, and by indicting him and threatening him with prison for the rest of his life. Everything that the Democrats have done to try to stop Trump is further proof that Trump was right about the 2020 election. There is only one threat to our country and our democratic process, and it is the Democrat Party.
