California Lieutenant Governor Calls for Trump to Be Kicked Off Ballot

A Colorado court’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot may have unfurling implications across the nation.

On Thursday, California’s Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis called on the secretary of state to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot,” leveraging the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision as a precedent.

“This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of our democracy,” Kounalakis wrote in the letter. “California must stand on the right side of history. California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot.”

“There will be the inevitable political punditry about a decision to remove Trump from the ballot, but it is not a matter of political gamesmanship. This is a dire matter that puts at stake the sanctity of our constitution and our democracy,” she concluded.

Kounalakis’s call will likely incense some of the state’s voters, more than 34 percent of whom supported Trump in the last presidential election. Still, California could soon become a part of a growing movement of states that have formally tried to kick Trump’s name out of their voting booths, including Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota. The GOP front-runner’s hold at the top of the primary ballot is also facing legal challenges in more than a dozen states, including Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Vermont, and Virginia.

The Colorado court’s 3–4 ruling dually determined that Trump participated in insurrection on January 6, 2021, and that his bid for the Oval Office violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from holding public office.

And while Colorado’s decision is the first of its kind, its challenge is also likely to be appealed up to the overwhelmingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with three Trump-appointed judges. That will pin the nation’s highest court as an even more integral component of the 2024 presidential election than it had already primed itself for following the decision to hear several high-profile reproductive rights cases.

Republicans, meanwhile, have balked at the nation’s turn on their favorite, ironically slamming state’s decisions to decide for themselves what they consider to be constitutional despite their traditional, states-rights party philosophy.