“President Donald J Trump won the Iowa caucuses with the largest margin ever for a non-incumbent and the New Hampshire primary with the most votes of any candidate from either party. He is the presumptive Republican nominee and the leading candidate for President of the United States. In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,’ the American people – not courts or election officials – should choose the next President of the United States.”
“As this Court has explained: ‘The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.’ Yet at a time when the United States is threatening sanctions against the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela for excluding the leading opposition candidate for president from the ballot, respondent Anderson asks this Court to impose that same anti-democratic measure at home. To date, at least 60 state and federal courts throughout the country have refused to remove President Trump from the ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court is the lone outlier, and this Court should reverse, for the reasons below, and protect the rights of the tens of millions of Americans who wish to vote for President Trump,” write fat former President Trump’s lawyers in the intro to their reply brief to the Supreme Court ahead of Thursday’s big showdown.
The next section starts off with the lawyers arguing that the president “is not an officer of the United States” even though Trump’s own lawyers claimed he was an “officer” no less than 11 times on May 4th of last year when they tried to get his Manhattan indictment moved to federal court.