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The move by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot of the March 5 Republican presidential primary there and the general election should he be nominated in Nov. 2024 is causing Republicans, including his opponents, to predictably circle the wagons around Trump. It appears to be causing fissures among Democrats as well, who see the move will only help Trump.
Writing for NBC News, Jonathan Allen, Katherine Doyle, and Dasha Burns write, “Colorado hands Trump a political gift by barring him from the ballot,” in which even Democrats worry that the push to disenfranchise Trump and his millions of supporters will backfire and help Trump in the general election against incumbent President Joe Biden, who is already trailing Trump in national polls with less than a year to go to the election.
The story says that the Biden campaign is actually worried about the blowback involved, quoting a source saying of the White House and the Biden campaign: “They’re pissed… [because it makes it look] like Colorado is attempting election interference through non-elected Democratic-appointed justices with funding from ‘shady left-wing donors.’”
The source added, “We all hope Biden wakes up on Christmas morning to an A3 story in the Delaware News Journal saying that the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Trump.”
In other words, Democrats are finally worried that the push to remove Trump from the ballot, denying the American people a natural choice in the 2024 election—predicated on Democratic prosecutors trying Trump in four different jurisdictions to imprison him—makes them look like stone cold tyrants.
No kidding.
In 2016, one of the knocks against Trump was that he would use the power of the government to prosecute his political opponents. “Lock her up” was a frequent chant at Trump rallies as his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was under an FBI investigation for the alleged mishandling of classified documents on a private email server operated out of her residence during her time as Secretary of State.
In 2016, before he ever took office, at the Republican National Convention, Trump initially rejected the convention’s chants of “lock her up,” referring to Hillary Clinton’s keeping classified documents on her private server at home, and instead implored “Let’s defeat her in November.”
But by the time he got to the second presidential debate against Clinton in Oct. 2016, he threatened to do the same thing to her: “I tell you what, I didn’t think I would say this, but I’m going to, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I will instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to investigate your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it. And we’re gonna have a special prosecutor.”
Of course, he never did.
In response to Clinton’s own problems, Democrats and other anti-Trump officials in the federal government used the nation’s security apparatus to launch a counterintelligence and then criminal investigation of Trump on false charges conjured by his opponent that he was a Russian who had conspired with Moscow to hack the DNC and John Podesta emails and put them on Wikileaks.
When Clinton was under FBI investigation over her keeping classified emails on a private server because she was lazy and wanted to receive national security information on her smartphone, with the FBI investigation as a specter over her campaign, her campaign sought to get a Justice Department against her opponent to even things out.
This has created a vicious cycle as civil society spirals into an abyss. Now, prosecuting political opponents has become normalized.
To the extent that this push by radical Democrats, including President Biden, who let all this happen on his watch as he gave reckless speeches about “MAGA Republican extremists” in response to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, could potentially seal Biden’s fate as many Democrats and more and more independents opt for either Trump or Robert Kennedy, Jr., it should become clear that the American people oppose the weaponization of government against political opponents.
Because if the American people don’t oppose the use of the government to imprison and disenfranchise their opponents, there might not be anything that can save the Constitution and civil society — and we’ve got a much bigger problem on our hands.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at the Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Cross-Posted with Conservative Firing Line
