Maine joined Colorado in barring from its GOP primary ballot yesterday, as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) decided that she “had no choice.” She had no choice because she is a rapid partisan Leftist who, like many Democratic operatives in various positions of power within the legal establishment, she is determined that President Biden be rescued from his election peril by any means necessary. Trump’s actions before and during the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol do not justify charging him with inciting a riot, much less an “insurrection” that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Maine’s completely partisan and anti-democratic move is sure to be appealed along with Colorado Supreme Court’s finding last week that Trump could not appear on the ballot in that state under the 14th Amendment provision designed to keep members of the Confederacy that prevents insurrectionists from holding office. The U.S. Supreme Court will review the case, one hopes quickly, and had better resolve the issue of whether Trump can run again or if the nation will be thrown into Constitutional chaos by allowing some states to block him.

SCOTUS could, if John Roberts is overcome with one of his weenie attacks, decide the case narrowly without getting to the merits of the NeverTrump 14th Amendment Big Lie. Because it is a Big Lie, one of many that the Left has tried to use to bring down Trump before, while he was President and ever since, that it has reached this stage is horrifying, and I say that as someone who profoundly hopes for some legal and fair way to take Trump out of the 2024 election. This isn’t it. Like the two impeachments and the unethical Nancy Pelosi-Liz Cheney January 6 Star Chamber in the House, the Maine and Colorado actions are far more serious attacks on the nation’s democacy than the stupid, futile, January 6 rioting.

Jonathan Turley outlined as clearly as anyone has why the Section 3 application to Trump is untenable and dangerous. There are two main reasons. The first is that the 14th Amendment, like the Emoluments Clause that the Axis [the “resistance,” Democrats and the media] dredged out of the dead letter pond in one of its potential impeachment theories, is a narrow and archaic provision that has never been used except in the specific instances it was designed for: when former members of the Confederacy wanted to run for office after the Civil War. The second is that there was no insurrection in 2021, and so Trump cannot be labeled an insurrectionist.

The apparently officially-sanctioned Democratic Party talking point is that since Section 3 of the 14th requires no official finding that an individual is an insurrectionist, there is no Due Process breach to disqualify Trump without any trial on the question. In other words, the Axis thinks that its simply calling the Capitol riot an insurrection repeatedly makes it an insurrection. That’s a Big Lie purveyor’s dream: repeat it enough, and it’s true. When he 14th Amendment was passed, there was no crime of “insurrection,” and no definition of it in the Constitution. There didn’t need to be, because a civil war is by definition an insurrection, and that’s what Section 3 was about: the Civil War just completed. Congress made rebellion and/or insurrection a federal crime with 18 USC 2383 in 1948, so now there is something other than the Civil War to use to trigger Section 3. Trump, however, hasn’t been charged with violating 18 USC 2383, because he didn’t, and no prosecutor, even Jack Smith, Trump’s own personal Javert, is foolish enough to charge him. (I would view doing so as an ethics violation justifying bar sanctions.) The Democrats who desperately want to stop American from having the chance to vote for Trump have decided he is an insurrectionist because they have been saying so for three years. That’s it. That’s their case.

If the Colorado and Maine ruling stands, it will create a situation in which any politician who is sufficiently unpopular and controversial could be banned from the ballots of states with an unethical and partisan Supreme Court. As others have noted, the concerted efforts to use extralegal means to undermine Trump’s Presidency was far closer to an insurrection than the actions of the drunken mob on January 6, 2021.

It profoundly depressed me to read Scalia Law School’s Ilya Somin‘s support for the bogus insurrection theory. He’s a constitutional scholar, but now heads my Bias Makes You Stupid victims list. Somin’s argument is tortured at best, and he never makes a convincing case that the Capitol riot qualifies as an insurrection. A Harvard study found that most of the January 6 rioters were not trying to overthrow the government, but to express their anger and disapproval over what they felt was an unfair election and to support President Trump, whom they believed was the victim of it.

Of course, that’s a study from an institution that is itself lacking in integrity and trustworthiness…

Once the dangerous Section 3 conspiracy is derailed for good by the Supreme Court (and in stating it this way I am channeling the Hickory high school basketball coach played by Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers,” when he tells a shaky sub at a crucial point in a must-win game, “After Ollie makes his free throw—and you WILL make your second free throw—“), the American public is likely to be faced with a terrible choice: vote for a vengeance-obsessed man who has proven himself untrustworthy and unstable as a crucial symbolic vote against the Democratic Party that has demonstrated hostility to the Constitution and the rule of law, or vote for a mentally-collapsing President whose first term has been a disaster across the board and his political party that is now hostile to both the Constitution and core American values.

It’s a crummy choice, but voters have a right to make it, and only one party is trying to take the right away. I think that by itself makes the responsible choice clear.