Donald Trump has found an unlikely ally in his fight not to be removed from Colorado's election ballot — the moderately liberal editorial board of the Washington Post.
The editors, in a column published last Wednesday, listed reasons why the ruling that the former president can’t stand for public office because he took part in an insurrection is deeply flawed — largely because he has not been convicted or even arrested on charges relating to it.
And, they said, if Trump falls just on an assumption that he took part, what’s to stop the same standard being applied to anybody who attends a protest?
“What’s to stop a Republican politician from seeking to bar his Democratic opponent because the opponent attended Black Lives Matter protests, claiming that those protests, some of them nominally in service of abolishing the police, qualify as insurrection?” the board asked.
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Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Trump can’t appear on its electoral ballot based on the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding public office.
The Post’s issue with that, however, was who is saying Trump was an insurrectionist?
“According to the court, … Mr. Trump, having egged on his supporters as they stormed the U.S. Capitol, is an insurrectionist,” the board wrote.
“Obvious as this analysis might seem to citizens appalled at the then-commander-in-chief’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, the law is not so clear.”
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The editors then pointed to a dissent by a a Colorado Supreme Court justice to illustrate this point.
“As Justice [Carlos] Samour points out in his dissent, however, what’s missing from the majority’s analysis is due process of law," they write. “Not only has Mr. Trump not been convicted of insurrection either by a jury of his peers or from the bench by a judge; he hasn’t even been charged with it.”
Though Trump will stand trial on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States on Jan. 6 and that he obstructed an official proceeding when he attempted to block President Joe Biden from being declared winner of the 2020 general election, he has not been accused of "violating the federal law against insurrection."
“Disqualifying a candidate based on an accusation, albeit one blessed by a state court judge as in the Colorado case — but not an actual conviction — is dangerous,” the board wrote. "The potential for abuse is ample.”
