Donald Trump
Maine’s Supreme Court decided Wednesday to throw out a decision by Secretary of State Shanna Bellows barring former US President Donald Trump from participating in the state’s Republican primaries until the federal Supreme Court rules on his eligibility for the role. Attack on the Capitol.
Judge Michaela Murphy has ruled that state voters can vote for Magnet on March 5, the date the primary is scheduled. If the Supreme Court ends the legal battle before that date, Bellows is obligated under state law to issue a new ruling, she argued.
Murphy was appointed to the post by a Democratic governor in 2007 and later reappointed by Republican Paul LePage, a Trump supporter. In Maine, these types of decisions first go through the secretary of state, though they can then be appealed to state courts, as reported by CNN.
Trump appealed the decision in January
This comes after former President Trump appealed the decision in early January, arguing that Bellows is a “biased legislator” that she “failed to provide due process of law” and that she made “multiple errors of law.”
Bellos asserted that he “did not come to this conclusion lightly,” though he made the decision because he “used the false narrative of electoral fraud on January 6 to inflame his supporters and drive them to the Capitol”.
“Democracy is sacrosanct (…) I am aware of no Secretary of State ever disqualifying a presidential candidate from election on the basis of Article Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he highlighted in his decision last December.
Maine became the second state to bar Trump from a state primary under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars anyone who has taken an oath to the Constitution and engaged in sedition from holding public office again.
However, it is expected that the Supreme Court of the United States will have to solve this problem, since other states – such as Michigan or Minnesota – have rejected this position. Before Maine, it was the Colorado Supreme Court that issued a surprise ruling that eliminated Republicans from the election.
