A WSJ editorial that calls out Donald Trump for Jan 6, but also the latest ballot denying tactics of Dem state officials. Balanced, mature, informative.
This week’s huge in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is from Maine secretary of state Shenna Bellows, who announced Thursday that she will unilaterally delete Mr. Trump’s name from the presidential primary ballot. Maine is now the second state, after Colorado, to declare him a Jan. 6 insurrectionist under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Paging the U.S. Supreme Court, alas.
Ms. Bellows’s administrative ruling largely tracks the opinion last week from the Colorado Supreme Court, except she blows through all the knotty legal questions in a breezy 34 pages. Section 3 was passed after the Civil War to stop Confederates who “engaged in insurrection” from retaking government posts. Applying it to Mr. Trump and the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, involves a series of dubious legal propositions.
Is Section 3 “self-executing,” so states may enforce it without further congressional guidance? “It stands to reason,” Ms. Bellows concludes after two paragraphs of analysis.
Does the disqualification provision cover Mr. Trump? Section 3 doesn’t explicitly mention the Presidency. There’s catchall language that includes anyone who previously took an oath as an “officer of the United States,” but some legal minds, including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, say that phrase excludes Mr. Trump. Ms. Bellows disagrees without engaging the contrary textualist argument.
Was Jan. 6 an “insurrection”? She says yes and accepts a definition that might encompass all sorts of political lawbreaking. Did Mr. Trump “engage” in it? This question “is a closer one,” she writes. But by “a preponderance of the evidence,” she finds that Mr. Trump’s actions were “incitement of insurrection,” which in her view is enough to trigger Section 3.
Skepticism of this legal daisy chain is not a defense of Mr. Trump. After filling up his supporters with falsehoods about a stolen election, calling a Jan. 6 rally, riling up the crowd, and urging it to march on the Capitol, Mr. Trump is responsible for what happened. His apparent reluctance to call off the mob or help a besieged Congress, as he watched the violence on TV, was a dereliction of the highest order.
A statesman driven by the public interest, instead of personal vindictiveness, wouldn’t have played with this fire. But lengthy Jan. 6 investigations have produced no evidence that Mr. Trump was privately communicating with the rioters or knew in advance what the vanguard in the crowd was going to do. Jan. 6 was not the Civil War or even the Whiskey Rebellion.
Colorado’s order kicking Mr. Trump off the ballot has been appealed to the Supreme Court, which is where the reach of Section 3 ultimately needs to be settled. The judiciaries in Minnesota and Michigan have declined invitations to disqualify Mr. Trump, as has California’s secretary of state. Maine shows, however, that me-too states will read the Colorado decision as a permission slip. The Supreme Court will have to step in if the U.S. is going to avoid patchwork democracy in 2024 and beyond.
Ms. Bellows is a former ACLU official, served in the state Senate as a Democrat, and ran for the U.S. Senate against Republican Susan Collins. Her ruling gets her name in the headlines and perhaps will be a boost in her next try for higher office. She has added nothing to the legal merits, though she has reinforced Mr. Trump’s campaign narrative.
Maine is unlikely to matter in the GOP primary, and meantime Ms. Bellows is giving Mr. Trump another chance to tell Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election before the voting begins. Democrats really do want to run against Mr. Trump next year.