After deciding that former President Donald Trump should be excluded from the state’s 2024 GOP presidential primary ballot, Colorado’s highest court sparked a succession of similar complaints by activists elsewhere across the country.
Some type of challenge to Trump’s eligibility has been registered in more than half of the nation’s states, though most failed to gain any discernible traction. In Michigan, however, such a complaint made it to the state Supreme Court.
The ruling favored Trump, though, with justices concluding that the petitioners did not present a compelling enough argument for further review of the case, thus allowing Trump’s name to remain on the ballot.
As in Colorado, the anti-Trump activists behind the Michigan complaint claimed that the then-president’s actions following the 2020 presidential election violated the 14th Amendment’s so-called “insurrection clause.”
The Colorado Supreme Court handed down a split decision that narrowly determined Trump should be disqualified as a result.
“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the decision stated. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
Michigan’s high court was not convinced, joining states including Minnesota and Arizona in rejecting the argument.
It’s a shame that the attempt to have Trump REMOVED from the ballot had to go all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. These attempts to RIG the election should be thrown out EVERYWHERE! KEEP TRUMP ON THE BALLOT IN ALL 50 STATES!!
— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) December 27, 2023
Only one justice, Elizabeth Welch, offered a dissenting opinion. Her statement essentially served to reject the notion that the court should have considered the matter in the first place.
“The secretary of state is not legally required to confirm the eligibility of potential primary candidates,” Welch wrote. “She lacks the legal authority to remove a legally ineligible candidate from the ballot once their name has been put forward by a political party in compliance with the statutes governing primary elections.”
Trump weighed in on the news in a social media statement declaring that the court “strongly and rightfully denied the Desperate Democrat attempt to take the leading Candidate in the 2024 Presidential Election … off the ballot in the Great State of Michigan.”
