A Denver courtroom on Monday will hear opening arguments in a legal challenge to former President Donald Trump’s constitutional eligibility to seek that office again, in a landmark case widely expected to ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of six Colorado voters, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleged that Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election disqualify him from Colorado’s presidential ballot under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Section 3 of the Civil War-era amendment bars anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office in the United States.
The suit named both Trump and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, as defendants. The Colorado Republican Party, which has certain powers under state law to determine ballot access for its candidates, has been granted so-called intervenor status and will also participate in the trial.
“Donald Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election,” says the lawsuit, which was filed on Sept. 6 in Denver District Court. “His efforts culminated on January 6, 2021, when he incited, exacerbated, and otherwise engaged in a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol by a mob who believed they were following his orders, and refused to protect the Capitol or call off the mob for nearly three hours as the attack unfolded.”
Similar lawsuits have been filed, and in some cases dismissed, in states including Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But the Colorado case — the first to be filed by CREW, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and the first to go to trial — represents the most substantial test for such efforts to date. CREW represented plaintiffs who cited the 14th Amendment in a successful suit to remove from office Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, New Mexico, who had participated in the Jan. 6 attack.
In filings seeking the case’s dismissal, Trump’s attorney’s have made a variety of arguments, many of which relate to procedural matters or the state court’s jurisdiction over the issue. But they also flatly deny the substance of the suit’s insurrection allegations.
“After the 2020 election cycle, President Trump made various statements and took various legal actions questioning the fairness or accuracy of the announced results,” Trump’s attorney’s wrote in a Sept. 29 motion to dismiss. “But he is hardly the first politician to do that — and Petitioners identify no facts that could convert this political controversy into an insurrection against the government.”
One of Trump’s attorneys in the Colorado case, Scott Gessler, is a former Republican secretary of state. While holding that office, he defended his authority in 2012 to bar constitutionally ineligible candidates from the Colorado ballot, in response to a lawsuit brought by Abdul Hassan, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Guyana who sought to make the presidential ballot in 2012.
That case eventually produced a ruling by the Denver-based Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in which future Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch affirmed that “a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”
This story was published earlier by the Colorado Newsline, an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom network, which includes the Florida Phoenix.
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