Legal scholar calls out “deeply flawed” arguments against Colorado and Maine rulings barring Trump

Arguments criticizing the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine secretary of state’s rulings that Donald Trump be removed from the 2024 presidential primary ballot are “deeply flawed,” a legal scholar says. Following the former president’s Tuesday lawsuit in Maine requesting Secretary of State Shenna Bellow’s ruling be vacated and his name restored to the ballot, University of Baltimore Law Professor Kim Wehle argued that commentators’ declarations that both rulings are anti-democratic lack merit. 

Voters don’t have a “‘democratic’ right to pick whomever they want for president under our system of laws,” Wehle wrote in The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative news site, pointing to the Constitution’s age and residency requirements for any potential candidate and individual states’ laws governing ballot eligibility. Further complaints that Trump was denied due process are also moot, Wehle explains. In the Colorado case, Trump received due process through the multi-day evidentiary hearing, while Maine law‘s process authorizing the secretary of state to decide ballot qualifications and the Superior Court to hear appeals “is due process at work,” she said.

Wehle also highlighted the Maine official’s point in the ruling that Trump’s lawyers did “not meaningfully dispute” his role in the attack, which Bellows ruled includes incitement of insurrection. “The point of a trial—which critics claim he’s constitutionally entitled to before being kept off any ballot across the country—is to resolve factual disputes,” Wehle writes. Bellows’ ballot ruling came last week, just nine days after the Colorado Supreme Court delivered a similar decision. She received death threats after Trump supporters posted her personal information online, and was swatted, incidents Wehle called a “terrible foretaste of the lawlessness we might see in the months ahead, as Donald Trump’s supporters act in service of his lies and ambition.”