Michigan Judge Refuses to Do Dems' Bidding, Hands Trump Win
The Democrats keep on trying to shut down Republicans using text from the 14th Amendment. And courts, in turn, keep on shutting them down.
In the latest loss for a group of liberal plaintiffs seeking to disqualify any Republican who didn’t immediately want Congress to certify the 2020 election results, a Michigan judge tossed a lawsuit on Tuesday that tried to use Civil War-era language meant to disqualify former Confederate officials from office to get Trump off the ballot, according to CNN.
Not only that, in a separate ruling, the same judge said that Michigan’s secretary of state also couldn’t rule that Trump is ineligible because of the “insurrectionist ban” language.
Just to be clear, here’s the language in question: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The 14th Amendment goes on to say that “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Considering you couldn’t get two-thirds of Congress to declare milk white if the wrong party introduced it, that’s rather out of the question. Thus, liberal groups have been trying — and failing — to get Republicans who acted against certifying the 2020 election, most notably Trump, off the ballot for good.
In Minnesota, the state Supreme Court rejected a challenge to remove Trump from the ballot last week. Efforts have been made to remove individual representatives from the ballot — most notably Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina. (Republican primary voters did give the controversial Cawthorn the boot of their own accord, however.)
While the 14th Amendment is the subject of a lot of jurisprudence, it usually has to do with the due process clause of the post-Civil War amendment. Disqualifying Democrats for office after they expressed doubt over the outcomes of the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections was never even considered an option.
But once the Capitol incursion occurred, Jan. 6, 2021, was deemed literally worse than 9/11 or Pearl Harbor for some on the left, and the “insurrection” clause suddenly became a Big Thing™.
However, they’ve received not one major court victory thus far and don’t seem likely to get a favorable result anytime soon.
In the Michigan case, Michigan Court of Claims Judge James Redford ruled that Congress should address what was, in essentiality, a “political question” that isn’t the purview of the judiciary.
The court taking Trump off the ballot, Redford wrote, would unconstitutionally usurp the decision on whether to exclude him from “a body made up of elected representatives of the people of every state in the nation, and gives it to but one single judicial officer, a person who no matter how well intentioned, evenhanded, fair and learned, cannot in any manner or form possibly embody the represented qualities of every citizen of the nation.”
Which is to say, Congress.
A ruling in a materially similar case is pending in Colorado and is expected by the end of this week; if the results were any different, voters should be shocked.
Considering that the law has only seen application two times since 1919, and never on a major candidate of Trump’s stature, this use of the law is beyond novel and has nothing to do with the original intent.
“Each and every one of these ridiculous cases have lost because they are all un-Constitutional left-wing fantasies orchestrated by monied allies of the Biden campaign seeking to turn the election over to the courts and deny the American people the right to choose their next president,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.
As for the group that lost the Michigan lawsuit? It said it would be filing an “immediate appeal” and get the state Supreme Court to intervene, arguing the judge “adopted a discredited theory” regarding Congress’ role in the insurrection clause.
“The Michigan Supreme Court should reverse this badly-reasoned lower court decision,” said Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People, which filed the lawsuits in both Michigan and Minnesota.
“While our appeal is pending, the trial court’s decision isn’t binding on any other court, and we continue our current and planned legal actions in other states to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Donald Trump.”
Considering Michigan is definitely in play in the 2024 election, and Trump could have a long-shot’s chance in Colorado and Minnesota, these should still remain legal actions of concern to conservatives. Both Michigan and Minnesota rulings left open the door to an appeal, after all.
However, until a liberal group scores a victory in one of the cases, this becomes yet another pipe dream to get rid of Trump and other Trump-allied Republicans by any means necessary — up to and including the judiciary. Good on this judge for realizing how wrongheaded the merits of this Democrat feint are.
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