Trump appeals Maine 14th Amendment ballot ban

Former President Trump on Tuesday appealed a decision kicking him off Maine’s primary ballot to state court on Tuesday, beginning the next phase of the consequential 14 Amendment case. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) , becoming the second state to rule Trump is ineligible under the 14 Amendment’s insurrection ban.

Trump’s appeal to Kennebec County Superior Court kicks off a speedy timeline, prescribed under state law, to resolve the matter. The dispute could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which is already grappling with a 14 Amendment case that kicked Trump off the primary ballot in Colorado. In Maine, the judge is required to decide the case within 20 days of Bellows’s decision, which was issued Dec.

28. Bellows’s ruling is on hold until then, meaning Trump’s name will remain on Maine’s ballot in the meantime. Maine’s primary will occur on Super Tuesday, March 5. The losing side could subsequently appeal to Maine’s highest court, with state law allotting two weeks for a decision.

The dispute could then land at the Supreme Court. Maine and Colorado have been the only states so far to take the extraordinary step of removing Trump’s name from the ballot, although plaintiffs have filed more than two dozen challenges under the 14 Amendment to Trump’s candidacy nationwide.

The Amendment prohibits someone from holding “any office … under the United States” if they “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to support the Constitution. Anti Trump plaintiffs cite the then president’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, contending he incited the riot and is disqualified from returning to the White House.

The cases also revolve around several threshold issues, including if the Amendment applies to the presidency and whether state courts and officials have authority to enforce the clause. “I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment.

I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection,” Bellows wrote in her decision. Trump and his campaign have broadly attacked the ruling and Bellows herself, with Trump’s lawyers having asked for the secretary of state’s recusal the day before she issued her decision..