We already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”
Voters challenging former President Donald Trump’s eligibility to return to the White House told the Supreme Court Friday that Trump is attempting to sidestep the evidence that he stoked the attack on the Capitol three years ago.
“The thrust of Trump’s position is less legal than it is political. He not-so-subtly threatens ‘bedlam’ if he is not on the ballot,” attorneys for the Colorado voters wrote in a 70-page filing submitted Friday. “But we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”
The 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, the lawyers continued, “is designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again.”
The court will hear oral arguments in the case on Feb. 8.
Trump’s detractors say his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack disqualifies him from appearing on the ballot based on the Civil War-era constitutional amendment, which bars people from holding federal office if they “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to support the Constitution.
In his own Supreme Court brief last week, the lawyers for the voters note, Trump didn’t dispute that the Jan. 6 attack itself was an insurrection. And they say he made only a “perfunctory” attempt to disclaim his role in it.
Rather, they contend, Trump spent the bulk of his argument suggesting that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to presidential candidates and that his exhortations to the Jan. 6 crowd he summoned to Washington were protected free speech.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/trump-ballot-eligibility-challengers-00138118