There’s been quite a bit of chatter over the last few weeks on potential efforts to remove disgraced former President Trump from the ballot in a number of states next year. Here’s Virginia Senator Tim Kaine this morning addressing a question on it from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Kaine’s head is the right place, gently calling it a liberal pipe dream that nobody should be taking it too seriously, especially not at the expense of any bandwidth that could be devoted to Dems actually winning a Biden vs Trump rematch outright. Between the longshot nature of it and the sheer amount of moving parts involved across 50 states with really only a handful of them in which such an effort would even make sense to try that makes it almost pointless to even address.
That said, there are a few wild cards worth watching, starting with New Mexico. Alex Curtas, a spokesman for Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver tells Talking Points Memo they’re “aware of and are reviewing the legal theories regarding the 14th Amendment that conclude Donald Trump is ineligible to run for President. If Donald Trump files in New Mexico to run for President, we will make a determination at that time based on our understanding of New Mexico law and the requirements to run for office in New Mexico. Any determination about a specific candidate’s eligibility for the ballot will be made after the candidate filing day in February 2024”
New Mexico is probably by far the one state where a disqualification for the fat fuck is most likely given how his minion, former Otero County Commissioner and “Cowboys for Trump” founder Couy Griffin was removed from office and banned from running again for life by the state following his conviction on a misdemeanor charge of entering a restricted area at the Capitol during the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection there becoming the first American politician in over 150 years to be disqualified under the 14th Amendment, written to exclude former Confederates from government.
Which tells us that for any challenge to Trump’s eligibility for the ballot to succeed he would first need to be convicted in a court of law for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The chances of that happening before the June 4, 2024 New Mexico presidential primary are not small given the scheduled March 2024 timing and DC location of the trial on his indictment on four felony counts brought by a grand jury impaneled by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.
But it’s New Mexico. People often forget that it was one of seven states in which Trump fanboys signed and submitted to the National Archives a slate of false electors in 2020 (ones the explicitly stated as being merely “contingent” which is why they’re unlikely to get in any trouble). Probably because there’s almost zero chance Trump could ever win in New Mexico after already losing it twice, rendering a removal from the ballot meaningless in the math of the Electoral College.
That doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t fight and fight very hard to stay on the ballot, not just because he would perceive it as a grave violation of his rights, but more importantly to prevent efforts in other states, the ones that do matter to him in the electoral college (not to mention the GOP primary delegate race), from gaining momentum by citing the decisions made in New Mexico.
The whole situation is really a black box from there, with so many goddamned variables. The New Mexico state Supreme Court eventually upheld Griffin’s removal and he, to our knowledge, did not initiate any sort of federal appeal, which might’ve helped inform us on whether the matter is justiciable as such or if it would’ve been dismissed as a matter only for New Mexico state courts.
Some might want to cite the case against tree-punching weirdo former Congressman Madison Cawthorn but he lost his primary last year before a federal appeals court found the challenge was valid. Not much else to work with there other than to say that Trump does not want to be fighting disqualification in a North Carolina court to hang on to 16 electoral college votes.
And most certainly not in Georgia either, where his loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself put on the stand for several hours for the same reason last year. Notwithstanding Trump’s multi-count RICO indictment in the state, it still might be more of a (very, very onerous) headache than an existential threat to his eligibility should he find himself in the same chair.
Go south however and things get interesting. This is separate and apart from the 14th Amendment but self-executing if Trump is convicted of a federal felony in DC: There’s a very strong possibility he’s automatically barred from running for office in Florida and reversing it would require his sworn enemy Ron DeSantis to personally intervene to an extraordinary level using the state executive clemency board. It’ll probably happen in the end should push come to shove, but putting himself at the mercy of “Tiny D” is again somewhere that Donald absolutely will not want to be.
We could wrap this up by talking about how twisted this situation is and how hilarious it will be that Trump’s going to have to fight this state-by-state while campaigning and in criminal and civil court for his other self-created clusterfucks. Plenty of more qualified political and legal analysts have written about it at length and will continue to do so for the next 14 months. They’ll tell you how extraordinary and tragic it is how we have to come to this point and that the GOP should’ve taken care of it for us back in the second impeachment trial and so on and so forth.
What few if any of these jeremiads will remember to acknowledge is how actually normal and not tragic it is for candidates to be blocked from the ballot. It happens all the time. Those five Republicans booted from the gubernatorial primary over the canvassing scam in Michigan last year. That one running for Congress in Colorado for the same problem. “Oh but PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES are DIFFERENT” some fanboys might say, forgetting that Kanye West’s stupid 2020 campaign fucked up and was blocked from appearing on the ballot in every battleground state where he could’ve at least theoretically split votes from Joe Biden.
Yeah, those disqualifications were over statute and/or procedural violations, paperwork fuckups and/or cheating that doomed them. There’s no real subjectivity involved with determining whether or not a candidate whose canvassers handed in photocopied pages to make it look like they got more signatures than they actually were able to get people to sign for. Either they did or they didn’t. It’s asking more of elections officials (and really courts in the end) to make a determination on whether Trump disqualified himself officially from the ballot due to his actions after he lost in 2020.
There’s going to be zero-sum politics in Secretary of State’s offices and in the courts with conservatives and liberals, wall-to-wall media bullshit and hype as these challenges proceed. The circumstances of the challenge and Trump’s status as a major party candidate are as “unprecedented” as all the TV heads will fucking say three times in a single sentence when Chuck Todd asks them their totally unique insight. But the bedrock truth is that it’s really not all that weird for a presidential candidate to appear on the ballot in some states but not others. Shit happens.