The Colorado Democrats seeking to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot in their state may have overplayed their hand, according to one former White House lawyer.
Ty Cobb, who represented Trump during Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, told CNN Tuesday that the U.S. Supreme Court would override the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that would keep Trump off the state ballot if the case is appealed to them, which is almost certainly will be.
“I think this case will be handled quickly. I think it could be 9-0 in the Supreme Court for Trump,” Cobb told the outlet.
But it gets worse for the Democrats if Cobb is correct.
“Cobb further argued the ruling ‘vindicates’ Trump’s ‘insistence that this is a political conspiracy to interfere with the election and that… he’s the target and people shouldn’t tolerate that in America,’” according to a write-up of the interview that appeared that evening in The Hill.
The Colorado Supreme Court, in other words, is making Trump’s case for him. It’s unlikely that that was their intention.
Cobb said again that he believed the ruling would be unanimous: “I do believe it could be 9-0, because I think the law is clear.”
I would have to be clear for Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to side with court conservatives like Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito to render a 9-0 decision.
On Tuesday, the Centennial State’s highest court declared Trump unfit for its ballot due to what even The Hill—hardly a bastion of right-leaning thought—had to admit was “his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack” (emphasis added).
The court decided 4-3 that Trump had, in fact, engaged in insurrection—essentially convicting the former president without due process—and ordered him removed from the ballot in accordance with the 14th Amendment’s so-called “insurrection clause.”
By that argument, however, Trump had to be considered an “officer of the United States” for the clause to apply; however, Cobb noted that Chief Justice John Roberts had already written in a previous court decision that the president was not to be considered as such for the purposes of this amendment.
“The real key issue in this case is: is Trump an officer in the United States in the context in which that term is used in Article 3 of the 14th Amendment?” Cobb told CNN.
“And in 2010, Chief Justice Roberts explained in [Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board] that people don’t vote for officers of the United States,” he added.
Cobb almost quoted the decision: “The people do not vote for the ‘Officers of the United States,’” Roberts wrote in the court’s decision.
Thus, the president was not an “officer of the United States”; thus, Article 3 of the 14th Amendment cannot apply to him in the way the Colorado Supreme Court applied it to him; thus, it appears that the Colorado Supreme Court was following an agenda, not decided case law, in making its decision.
This is exactly what Trump and his supporters have been saying that liberal-leaning courts across the country have been doing all along.
The Colorado GOP has already promised an appeal to SCOTUS, as previously reported by The Western Journal; the Trump campaign has now issued a similar statement, according to The Hill.
“The Supreme Court though will not hesitate to move quickly on this; they know what the stakes are. They know what their responsibility is,” Cobb told CNN. “And they can delay some of these Colorado dates to the extent that they feel they’re obligated to or have to.”
via westernjournal