COLORADO: Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to withdraw from the GOP primary ballot in Colorado.
This decision comes in response to a recent ruling by the state’s Supreme Court, which removed former President Donald Trump from the ballot due to his involvement in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
In a narrow 4-3 decision, Colorado’s highest court invoked the 14th Amendment’s ‘insurrection clause’.
The court concluded that Trump’s actions, including spreading false claims of election fraud and directing supporters to the Capitol, amounted to engaging in insurrection. Colorado has thus become the first state to prevent Trump from seeking the presidency based on his role in the Capitol attack, The Hill reported.
The insurrection clause bars the holding of “any office…under the United States” if a person is engaged in insurrection after swearing to “support” the Constitution as an “officer of the United States.” The Colorado Supreme Court determined that this clause applies to the office of the president, the report added.
“I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is also allowed to be on the state’s ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal manoeuvre, which will have disastrous consequences for our country,” Ramaswamy posted on X, calling out his fellow candidates in the GOP presidential primary.
“This is what an actual attack on democracy looks like: in an un-American, unconstitutional, and unprecedented decision, a cabal of Democrat judges are barring Trump from the ballot in Colorado. Having tried every trick in the book to eliminate President Trump from running in this election, the bipartisan Establishment is now deploying a new tactic to bar him from ever holding office again: the 14th Amendment,” his post also read.
Another key GOP presidential candidate, Chris Christie, also weighed in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that it is voters and not the courts that should decide if Trump should be “prevented” from being re-elected to the White House, according to The Hill.