Colorado state legislators have voted down a ploy to impeach the state’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold amid still stewing outrage on the Right at her connections — both argued and actual — to recent efforts at keeping Donald Trump off the ballot this year because of his claimed involvement in the violence of January 6, 2021.
To be clear, though a challenge to Trump’s inclusion on state ballots that recently reached the U.S. Supreme Court did originate in Colorado, it was not Griswold’s doing. The challenge originated instead with private Coloradans, the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and others. Griswold has separately expressed her own stance on the dispute, insisting that the former president is, in fact, an “oath-breaking insurrectionist.”
The GOP ploy at Griswold’s impeachment was considered — and rejected — by the judiciary committee in Colorado’s state House. Democrats hold the majority in that legislative chamber.
The court challenge that sparked some of this outrage already culminated in a Supreme Court decision stripping the wind from its sails and those of cases like it, punting to Congress the question of actually carrying out Constitutional limits on insurrectionists holding office.
The only recent success in cases hinging on those Constitutional provisions was a court removing Trump supporter Couy Griffin from a role as a county commissioner in New Mexico after he faced criminal charges for joining early 2021’s Capitol chaos.
In Trump’s case, a succession of courts in Colorado did characterize the former president as involved in insurrection for the purposes of carrying out the invoked parts of Constitutional law, but that wasn’t enough for the nation’s highest court. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, expressed ambitions after the D.C. court’s decision to take up its implicit invitation for Congressional action and propose legislation by which specific procedures for carrying out the insurrectionist ban would be established.
