The U.S. Supreme Court took the wind out of the sails of various courtroom efforts around the United States to keep Donald Trump off the ballot this year in light of his argued involvement in the violence of January 6, 2021, at Washington, D.C.’s U.S. Capitol, but Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is standing by her stance on the matter.
“House Republicans tried to impeach me and they failed. There are no two sides of the truth: Trump is an oath- breaking insurrectionist,” said a post this week to the state official’s account on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter. An effort at impeaching Griswold flopped in Colorado’s state legislature.
Though it was not Griswold’s doing, Colorado is where the court challenge to Trump appearing on the ballot got moving that recently culminated in that Supreme Court decision, which punted the question to Congress. Some have seemingly tried crediting Griswold with this specific effort to keep Trump from appearing on state ballots, but — while she, at times, expressed her viewpoints on the dispute mirroring those shared this week — it was, again, not her doing. The case traced instead to interests including private Coloradans, the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and others.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) discussed the prospect following the Supreme Court’s decision of Congress taking up their implicit invitation to action and establishing specific procedures for carrying out the Constitutional provisions against insurrectionists holding office that challengers to Trump were trying to invoke. Raskin has himself been involved in putting forward legislation in the past that would have set up such a system, and he indicated intentions of doing so again, though major action would likely need to wait for a Democratic majority to reclaim power — a shift possible very soon.
