Former Attorney General Bill Barr opposed Democrats’ ongoing legal attempts to remove former President Donald Trump from the state ballots in multiple states nationwide.
“I am firmly opposed to Trump’s candidacy,” Mr. Barr said. “But I also believe that the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order.”
“The Supreme Court needs to act swiftly to strike down these foolish decisions,” he added.
Mr. Barr raised concerns over efforts to disqualify his former boss from the 2024 White House race in an op-ed published in The Free Press on Jan. 2 as the states of Colorado and Maine had decided to remove President Trump from state primary ballots. Despite these attempts, President Trump’s legal teams have managed to reinstate his name in those states.
“The actions of Colorado and Maine, and other states that follow suit, are not only doomed to legal failure, they also embolden and empower the former president,” he warned.
In the article, Mr. Barr questioned the legal efforts to remove President Trump based on an interpretation of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits certain individuals from holding public office if they have engaged in an “insurrection or rebellion.”
“As a legal matter, states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection,” he noted.
“Congress—not the states—gets to decide how individuals are disqualified from office under the Fourteenth Amendment,” he added.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and Section Three disqualifies those who joined the Confederacy from returning to public office without a two-thirds vote by Congress.
Mr. Barr pointed out the lack of fair due process for the 45th president in Colorado and Maine cases. “An individual must be afforded due process before the government can deprive him of an important right—like the right to pursue public office. In the cases of Colorado and Maine, President Trump was plainly denied due process,” Mr. Barr said.
“In neither case was Trump afforded a jury, the ability to cross-examine the evidence introduced against him, or the ability to subpoena witnesses. Much of the evidence introduced was hearsay or conclusory statements from congressional hearings, which did not allow for an adversarial process,” said the former Attorney General.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Barr also called on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that barred President Trump from the state ballot.
Unfair Gambits
Mr. Barr said that the U.S. national elections “could collapse in chaos” if each state uses its own definition of insurrection and its own procedures standards to bar a national candidate from running for office.
In the article, he criticized Democrats for their latest attempts using the Fourteenth Amendment to target President Trump. “The effort to use the Fourteenth Amendment to knock Trump off the ballot is much like the left’s previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretch the law beyond its proper bounds,” he said.
The former Attorney General then listed a series of Democrats’ efforts, which he said were “unfair,” to prevent the former president from running for office, ranging from Russiagate to ongoing legal battles in New York and Georgia.
“Such tactics undercut the credibility of legitimate efforts to hold Trump accountable, and they fix in much of the public’s mind the image of effete elites trying to game the system,” Mr. Barr noted.
“Nothing is more destructive of democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries,” he added.
Mr. Barr served in the Trump administration from 2019 to 2020 but has become a frequent critic of the former president after leaving office.
“I do not want Trump to get the GOP nomination. But he has to be beaten at the ballot box—not by subverting the basic systems of our democracy,” Mr. Barr said.
From The Epoch Times
