A team with Minocqua Brewing Company — a progressive beverage company in Wisconsin that has an affiliated super PAC, which is a form of political organization that can engage in advocacy — is preparing a lawsuit seeking to boot Donald Trump from the ballot in their state. The previewed case challenges Trump on the basis of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which blocks individuals who previously took an oath of office and then engaged in insurrection from later holding a wide variety of government positions. The connection made to Trump is the violence of January 6, 2021.
The same Constitutional provisions have been at issue in challenges to Trump appearing on the ballot in other states, like Colorado. Colorado’s highest state court recently ruled against Trump appearing on their state’s upcoming primary ballots at all, agreeing with the challengers including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and individual filers from the state, though they held off their ruling from taking effect for now. The Minocqua Brewing Company-tied lawsuit will follow a rejected complaint brought on similar grounds against Trump with the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Company owner Kirk Bangstad cast the commission’s quick rejection as a win considering it allows a speedier progression to further stages of the fight. “We feel like this decision is a win for us because it saves my team about a month of having the WEC muddy the waters, and allows us to file in Dane County Circuit court early next week. So that’s what we’re going to do. File a lawsuit against the WEC, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party of Wisconsin as soon as we can,” Bangstad said Thursday. An earlier post said that a forthcoming legal challenge in court to Trump’s eligibility for his currently unfolding presidential run would cover substance similar to the succeeding case in Colorado.
Trump also remains under legal threat from his four criminal cases. Prosecutors in the federal case alleging a series of conspiracies targeting the presidential election results from 2020 recently asked a judge for a series of sharp limits on what Trump’s team can say at eventual trial in front of jurors.
