What Did You Say?

By Trying To Keep Trump Off The Ballot, Democrats Are Staging A Coup In Broad Daylight

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 22, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/22/by-trying-to-keep-trump-off-the-ballot-democrats-are-staging-a-coup-in-broad-daylight/

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

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If it wasn’t obvious before now that the left will do anything to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term in the White House, the events of the last few days should leave no doubt in any American’s mind. Democrats, including President Biden, are prepared not only to rig the 2024 election in broad daylight but also to twist the U.S. Constitution and undermine the republic so they can hold on to power.

As most everyone knows by now, an infamous 4-3 majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that voters in their state will not be allowed to cast a ballot for Trump in next year’s presidential election. The court’s outlandish claim is that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot because Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says candidates who have “engaged in insurrection” are prohibited from holding public office.

According to the court, which is dominated by left-wing ideologues appointed by Democrat governors (all the judges on the Colorado Supreme Court are Democrats, some are just more radical than others), Trump meets this definition because he “incited” a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Never mind that Trump has yet to be convicted of a crime associated with Jan. 6 (or any crime for that matter) or that the 14th Amendment doesn’t include the president or vice president in a list of offices to which its Section 3 provision applies. For the leftists on the Colorado Supreme Court, it’s enough to declare Trump an insurrectionist and viola! He’s off the ballot — all in the name of “defending democracy.”

David French called it a “bold, courageous decision,” but setting aside the constitutional/legal debate, consider what it means practically. About 1.4 million Coloradans voted for Trump in 2020. All those voters, if they want to vote for Trump again this time, have been disenfranchised by the court. That’s bad enough, but the left’s strategy here is larger than just one state. Before the ink was dry on the Colorado ruling, California Democrats leapt into action. The lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, sent a letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber asking her to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.”

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 riot, this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and rule on the case before the lower court issues a ruling. As Byron York noted, Smith’s frantic brief doesn’t state the obvious: “He’s rushing to try Trump so Trump can be convicted and jailed before the election.”

Plenty of smart people have pointed out the glaring problems with the Colorado Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Namely, it stipulates Congress must establish a procedure for barring someone from office for engaging in insurrection, which Congress did, twice, first in 1870 and again in 1948. In the latter instance, Congress created a criminal insurrection law, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which is the enforcement mechanism for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The key point here is that Trump has not been charged or convicted under that statute, which means the U.S. Supreme Court will almost certainly overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s garbage ruling.

But set aside the legal fight because it doesn’t matter to the left. For Biden and the Democrats, this isn’t really a question of what the Constitution does or doesn’t say. This is a question of power and how far they will go to keep it. From the politicized court ruling in Colorado to the four criminal indictments against Trump amounting to 91 felony charges to Biden’s statement last November that he’ll use the Constitution to ensure that Trump “will not take power” and will not “become the next president,” what we have amounts to an open conspiracy to rig the 2024 election by preventing voters from casting a ballot for the likely GOP nominee.

It’s not too much to call this a coup or a color revolution. If Democrats get away with this, we won’t be able to say we have a republic anymore for the simple reason that we won’t have anything like free and fair elections. Democracy in America will be reduced to something like Democracy in Iran or Russia, where only regime-approved candidates are allowed to appear on the ballot.

And don’t think this will end if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Colorado decision. The Democrats will see it as a mere setback, not a defeat — and certainly not a deterrent. When they say, as they have been quite often lately, that Trump will never leave office if he wins next November, or that 2024 will be our last election ever if Trump prevails, they’re really talking about themselves. What they say Trump will do if he becomes president again is what they’re doing right now, before a watching world.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.