Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the Maine superior court to reverse secretary of state Shenna Bellows’s (D.) decision to remove him from the state’s 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot.
The move to bar Trump from the ballot, announced last week, was based on a reading of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, according to Bellows, renders Trump ineligible to hold public office as a result of his role in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. The wording reads as follows:
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. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Bellows’s order will not go into effect until after the court hears and decides the appeal. It is not the only legal action the Trump campaign has filed in response to the former president’s removal from the primary ballot; after the Colorado supreme court ruled in December that Trump was ineligible to appear on its state’s slate of GOP candidates, his camp signaled that it would appeal that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump’s appeal to the Maine superior court argues four points: “(1) the Secretary was a biased decisionmaker who should have recused herself and otherwise failed to provide lawful due process; (2) the Secretary had no legal authority . . . to consider the federal constitutional issues presented by the Challengers; (3) the Secretary made multiple errors of law and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner; and (4) President Trump will be illegally excluded from the ballot as a result of the Secretary’s actions.”
In California, meanwhile, a Democratic secretary of state, Shirley Weber, took the opposite approach. Lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis requested that Weber remove Trump from the state’s 2024 GOP primary ballot, citing the same argument that Bellows used, but Weber refused. In her response to Kounalakis, Weber said she is required “to ensure that any action undertaken regarding any candidate’s inclusion or omission from our ballots be grounded firmly in the laws and processes in place in California and our Constitution.”