Constitutional law expert and professor Jonathan Turley blasted the Colorado Supreme Court’s narrow decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot next year, warning what will happen next if the ruling stands.
Late Monday afternoon, the state’s highest court determined that Trump is ineligible to be a presidential candidate because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.” The verdict was 4–3. The decision will remain on hold until January 4th, when an appeal is considered, though the country hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case and reach a final decision by then, CNN reported.
“It is a strikingly anti-democratic holding, in my view,” Turley said. “The court literally faced a series of interpretive barriers to get to where it ended up. It adopted the most sweeping, broadest possible interpretation to get over every one of those hurdles. So throughout this opinion, it had to adopt interpretations that could encompass a wide array of statements.”
“They used what’s called true threat precedent to show that you can view what Trump said as encouraging an insurrection by looking at stuff that he said at other times. And that, of course, allowed them to reach this conclusion. In my view, the court is dead wrong,” he added, before adding that similar theories had already been rejected by other Democrat-appointed judges.
“I think the opinion is really chilling, and I think that the Supreme Court will make fast work of this theory; I hope it does,” Turley said.
Ingraham, who is an attorney herself, responded: “And there have been other rulings in other state supreme courts, correct? Or federal courts that have come to the opposite conclusion here. So this is an outlier, which, again, because of what’s at stake, it’s going to have to be expedited to the court, the Supreme Court.”
“Yeah, when you read this opinion, the one thing that keeps on recurring in your mind is: ‘Where is the limiting principle here?’” Turley offered. “What would not satisfy this test? At each one of these barriers, the court could have adopted a fairly moderate or more narrow approach. But it didn’t. And so, on every one of these issues, it really took out all the fail-safes and went to the broadest possible meaning.
“Well, that means that states could engage in a tit-for-tat type of series of decisions. You know, you could have red states blocking Biden on some ballots and blue states blocking Trump,” he predicted. “And the way this is viewed by the public is really quite horrific. You know, they view President Biden on the ropes, and the ref just called the match.”
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