https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/20/a-judicial-insurrection-against-democracy/
We didn’t need further proof that Trump Derangement Syndrome poses a graver threat to American democracy than Donald Trump himself, but we have it. The decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to disqualify Trump from holding office is the anti-Trumpists’ most egregious assault on democracy yet. It shows once again how willing they are to use the tactics of the banana republic, the sly schemes of a tinpot state, to take down a politician they love to loathe. ‘We are defending democracy’, they say, as they beat it to a pulp.
The Colorado justices – every one of whom was appointed by a Democratic governor – ruled four to three that Trump is ‘disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment’. The 14th is a post-Civil War amendment that forbids ‘insurrectionists’ from holding office. It was designed to keep unrepentant Confederates, men who had dragged the republic to war, away from seats of power. Trump’s supposed stirring-up of the boneheads and blowhards who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was an insurrection too, the justices decreed, and thus his name must be scrubbed from ballot papers across the state of Colorado.
First things first. The idea that the idiots who ran riot at the Capitol on 6 January are in any way comparable to a Confederacy of seven slave states that illegally broke from the American republic is unhinged. It is a testament to the historical illiteracy of the Democratic establishment that it would even hint at a likeness between men who caused a war that killed hundreds of thousands and Trumpists taking selfies in Congress during a conflagration that led to five deaths (three from natural causes). Not content with hysterically referring to 6 January as a domestic 9/11, now they’re implying it was a Civil War-level rupture. And this is leaving to one side the contested idea that Trump incited 6 January.
This is the first time a presidential candidate has been deemed unfit for election under the constitutional ban on insurrectionists. The impact of the ruling will be dire. If it holds – and it very well might not – it means Trump will be absent from presidential primary ballots in Colorado, meaning no one in the state could vote for him to be the GOP’s 2024 candidate. Hard luck Coloradans who want Trump back in the White House – your democratic right to elect him has been stolen from you by judges. Beyond the primaries, the court ruling would ‘probably also affect Trump’s status for the 5 November General Election’, says the Guardian. That is, if the ruling holds, Trump could be blocked from standing in Colorado even if he is freely selected as the Republicans’ presidential candidate in other states.