The same 14th amendment prevents the Colorado Supreme Court from removing anyone from the Presidential ballot.
The 14th amendment section 2 has a punishment for abridging the right to vote:
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.Note that this buttresses the exclusion of the President and Vice President from section 3, since section 2 speaks about denying or abridging the right to vote for the choice of Electors, and keeping someone off the ballot is the highest form of denial and abridgment.
The Constitutional punishment for preventing voters from voting for Electors of their choice in a state should be the direct loss of seats in the House of Representatives, and the indirect loss of Electors in the next election.
If the Colorado Supreme Court blocks President Trump from appearing on the ballot, they are denying the entire state the right to choose President Trump. It doesn't matter what polling suggests the actual vote would be, the entire state is denied the choice.
The 14th amendment should punish Colorado with the loss of their ENTIRE House delegation, and with it their Electoral College allocation, leaving Colorado with only the two Electors based on the Senate.
-PJ
Interesting idea, I like it.
But I think it means more denying citizens right to vote rather than denying a choice of whom they may vote for, but I understand your argument.
I think we are in a lawless time, as most recent decision shows.
"The 14th Amendment section 2 has a punishment for abridging the Right to Vote:"
You make a novel de novo argument, but your assertion, while valid and worthy of note, would end up secondary or even tertiary to this ballot access argument.
As other Freepers have noted, this miasma of untested 150-year-old election case law and similarly-aged statutes, paltry as it is, if taken at their worst, do not conclusively exclude Trump as a write-in candidate even if he had been Removed by either Senate trial!
As I just recently stated in another related thread,
"This is a salient point, that "Insurrection" as envisioned by both The Founders and the CWI fallout, both eras correctly proscribed "Insurrection" as siding with a complete break against the United States of America.The Founders based this on The British Empire, CW1 based this on The Confederacy, which was initially barely even dampened by Appomattox. "
THIS is the hurdle that Colorado state court system did not remotely (figuratively and literally) overcome."
The Colorado decision is so problematic on so many levels, a rogue state supreme court is nothing new -- Bush v Gore was a ruling to rein in a rogue state supreme court -- but while that court had at least reliance on an existing legislative pathway for their course of action, as Justice Samour's dissent revealed in his brutal smackdown of his fellow Democrats, the majority in the CREW decision weren't just way out over their skis constitutionally, but it could be plainly argued from Samour's dissent, that the Colorado Supreme Court directly engaged in Incitement to Insurrection!
" By concluding that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is self-executing, the majority approves the enforcement of that federal constitutional provision by our state courts through the truncated procedural mechanism that resides in our state Election Code.Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below — which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial — to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim.
And because most other states don’t have the Election Code provisions we do, they won’t be able to enforce Section Three. That, in turn, will inevitably lead to the disqualification of President Trump from the presidential primary ballot in less than all fifty states, thereby risking chaos in our country."
This has to stop and it has to stop now. SCOTUS must take the game-playing of the Colorado Supreme Court "Jan. 4 or until SCOTUS hears the case" and summon those justices to appear before them and explain their actions.
You want to stop lawfare that's how you do it, you make it real, you force these 'justices' to obtain lawyers, and make unpaid travel arrangements and get babysitters and you put them in front of the highest court in the United States and you simply have Justice Alito say, in his own quiet way:
"Explain how you came to the conclusion that you were entitled to create a Bill of Attainder on a former President when even the remote possibility of such an extreme prohibition belongs solely with Congress, and even then, it would be imbued with the stain of unconstitionality.Explain yourselves, right now, don't look back at your clerks who you encouraged to execute this calumny, each of you stand up here and look us in the eye and explain yourselves."
That is where we are at as a nation, that this neomarxist mafia that plagues our nation must be brutally exposed on this overreach and that the American people finally awaken, and renew their committment -- their obligation -- to justice and jurisprudence.