Former President Donald Trump has been removed from Maine’s 2024 primary ballot for his supposed role in the Jan. 6 incident at the U.S. Capitol Building.
On Thursday, the Maine secretary of state decided that the former president was ineligible to seek office under Section Three of the 14th Amendment.
Maine’s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take action unilaterally in a decision that has potential Electoral College consequences.
While Maine has just four electoral votes, it’s one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine’s electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate could have outsized implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.
The move comes about a week after Colorado’s Supreme Court voted to remove Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, although that decision was stayed Thursday. The state Republican party has vowed to take the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, another effort to influence the outcome of the 2024 election by removing the former president from the ballot in Michigan failed.
On Wednesday, Michigan's Supreme Court reached a decidedly different conclusion.
A liberal-leaning group had appealed a state appeals court ruling that concluded, regardless of whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding office, Michigan’s secretary of state lacks the legal authority to remove him from the ballot.
The state’s highest court, controlled by Democrats, let that lower ruling stand, saying in an unsigned order that it was “not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this Court.”
One day before Maine joined Colorado in using the legal system to potentially interfere in the upcoming presidential election, Trump demanded that Maine’s secretary of state recuse herself from influencing the decision.
Now, Trump's legal team is speaking out about Bellows' previous statements on social media regarding Jan.6, 2021 — and Trump:
Former President Trump on Wednesday demanded the Maine secretary of state recuse herself from her upcoming decision on the former president’s ballot eligibility under the 14th Amendment, citing her past statements about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.[...]
On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers wrote Bellows a letter demanding she disqualify herself over three tweets she previously issued referencing Jan. 6, including those in which she described the attack as an insurrection.
The letter continued:
Using similar language, the Challengers have claimed that the events of January 6, 2021, constituted a violent insurrection and that President Trump somehow poses a danger from which Maine voters must be protected. Thus, the Secretary has already passed judgment on the Challengers’ core assertions.
Maine is now the second state whose officials have resorted to using the 14th Amendment in this fashion. Section 3 of the amendment disallows people from holding office if they have been involved in a rebellion against the government. It was originally created to apply to former members of the Confederacy. But now, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have been leveraging it against Trump due to his candidacy for the White House.
The politically-motivated effort has met with criticism coming from the right and at this point, it seems inevitable that the matter will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.