Star Tribune
Trump ballot ban in Colorado puts insurrection clause petitioners on alert in Minnesota
The next step for a Minnesota challenge to former President Donald Trump’s 2024 ballot eligibility hinges on what the U.S. Supreme Court does with the Colorado high court’s surprise decision to disqualify him.
The threshold question is if and when the U.S. Supreme Court decides to hear Trump’s appeal of the Colorado ruling, according to John Bonifaz, president of the national nonprofit Free Speech for People. “If they do take it, stay tuned,” he said.
Last fall, Free Speech for People filed a petition in Minnesota claiming that Trump’s attempt to set aside the results of the 2020 election and his support for the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, disqualified him from holding future office.
In both Minnesota and Colorado, the challengers cited Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, commonly called the insurrection clause. The provision dates to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and prohibits former officers from holding office again if they’ve “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or “given aid or comfort” to those who did.
The Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed the challenge in early November. But on Tuesday, a slim majority of the Colorado Supreme Court said the clause prohibits Trump from being on the ballot next year. It was the first time in the nation’s history that the clause had been effectively been invoked.
Trump is expected to appeal the Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has the final word on constitutional issues.
In a statement late Tuesday, Trump legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said the decision “attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”
The Colorado court embraced the theory put forward last summer by two Federalist Society members who are nationally renowned constitutional law professors, including Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas Law School.
Paulsen co-authored the University of Pennsylvania Law Review article called “The Sweep and Force of Section 3.” The 126-page article was an online sensation that has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Along with University of Chicago law Prof. William Baude, Paulsen argued Trump is ineligible for the 2024 ballot because of his attempt to set aside the results of the 2020 election won by President Joe Biden.
The Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision didn’t address the constitutionality of Trump being on the ballot.
Instead, the court said no Minnesota law prohibits a major political party from placing on the ballot or nominating “a candidate who is ineligible to hold office.” The court then all but invited Free Speech for People to try again and raise the disqualification question for the general election.
Free Speech for People is waiting, for now, on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The ruling will be historically significant, potentially on par with the court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000 that ended the ballot recount in Florida. That controversial decision, gave Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush, sending him to the White House.
If the U.S. Supreme Court takes the case, decides it quickly and determines Trump is eligible to be on the 2024 ballot, that will settle the matter, Bonifaz said.
But if the high court upholds the Colorado ban, that would likely prompt ballot challenges in states across the country, he said.
Timing matters. If the court doesn’t hear the case quickly, that would mean another ballot challenge to Trump in Minnesota, Bonifaz said.
“Once Minnesota moves into the general election stage, in our view, this matter will be ripe for re-challenging,” he said.
Bonifaz said he believes the Minnesota Supreme Court’s ruling was wrong in determining that partisan primaries are internal matters. He said previous U.S. Supreme Court rulings say that when parties use the election machinery of a state, they’re engaging beyond internal affairs.
Alan Rozenshtein, constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota, was succinct in his assessment of the Colorado decision.
“The main impact is that it is likely to lead to an authoritative [U.S.] Supreme Court decision, which will resolve the Minnesota case without the Minnesota Supreme Court having to rule, which is what I suspect the Minnesota court desperately wanted to begin with,” he said.
Colorado officials say the issue there must be settled by Jan. 5, their deadline for printing presidential primary ballots.
Two men are dead and one woman was injured in a shooting at a homeless encampment in south Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon, police said. It was the second shooting at a Minneapolis encampment this weekend.
At about 2:20 p.m. Sunday, police responded to a reported shooting in the 4400 block of Snelling Avenue near the railroad tracks at the small encampment between Snelling and Hiawatha avenues. At the scene, officers found two men with fatal gunshot wounds, said Sgt. Garrett Parten Minneapolis Police spokesman. Responders rendered aid, but both men died at the scene.
A woman was found at the scene with life-threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital where she was being treated Sunday night, he said. Police have yet to say whether the three were living at the encampment.
Officers detained three people, who Parten said have since been released after police found they were not believed to be involved in the shooting. No suspects had been identified as of 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
The shooting is the second at a southside homeless encampment this weekend. One man died and two were critically injured early Saturday at an encampment shooting near E. 21st Street and 15th Avenue S. On Sunday, the man was identified as Deven Leonard Caston, 31, according to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“We don’t know if there’s a connection between this homeless encampment shooting and the one that occurred yesterday,” Parten said on Sunday. “That is a consideration of the investigation. We can’t rule it out.”
Ward 12 Council Member Aurin Chowdhury, who represents the area and lives nearby, was at the site of the shooting Sunday afternoon. She said officials need information about what happened to better understand how to address situations like this long-term.
“This is an absolute tragedy, and this type of violence should never occur within our city,” she said. “It really makes me think about how we need to look at this more systemically and not just take a whack-a-mole approach and expect the problem to go away.
During Sunday’s Twitch stream, Walz and Ocasio-Cortez played Madden while discussing making homebuying more accessible, building affordable housing, eliminating student loan debt and raising the federal minimum wage.
After the match, Walz showed off his Sega skills in a round of “Crazy Taxi,” the Y2K-era racing game where gamers play as a taxi driver picking up passengers and taking them to their destination for cash.
Walz called himself a “first-generation gamer” and recalled playing “Crazy Taxi” when he bought a Sega Dreamcast. He also mentioned the Minnesota Star Tribune’s coverage of how his old game console was sold and ended up with a Plymouth resident, who still has it.
Afterward, Walz and Ocasio-Cortez watched a short clip of Trump denying on Rogan’s podcast that he lost the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won that year.
Ocasio-Cortez during the livestream also showed viewers her farm on the cozy, indie game Stardew Valley. Walz said the game reminded him of Minnesota: “You’ve got mining,” he said. “You’ve got agriculture. You’ve got snow.”
Before Walz headed out to a rally in Nevada, he pleaded with viewers to vote. More than 12,000 viewers tuned into the livestream on Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel. More watched from Harris’ channel.
”Hey guys, they’re now scrambling and trying to call us Nazis and fascists,” said Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, who draped a sparkly ”MAGA” jacket over the lectern as she spoke. ”And you know what they’re claiming, guys? It’s very scary. They’re claiming we’re going to go after them and try and put them in jail. Well, ain’t that rich?”
Declared Hogan in his characteristic raspy growl: ”I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”
Trump has denounced the four criminal indictments brought against him as politically motivated. He has ramped up his denunciations in recent weeks of ”enemies from within,” naming domestic political rivals, and suggested he would use the military to go after them. Harris, in turn, has called Trump a ”fascist.”
The arena was full hours before Trump was scheduled to speak. Outside the arena, the sidewalks were overflowing with Trump supporters in red ”Make America Great Again” hats. There was a heavy security presence. Streets were blocked off and access to Penn Station was restricted.
In the crowd was Philip D’Agostino, a longtime Trump backer from Queens, the borough where Trump grew up. The 64-year-old said it was appropriate for Trump to be speaking at a place bills itself as ”the world’s most famous arena.”
”It just goes to show ya that he has a bigger following of any man that has ever lived,” D’Agostino said.
