Don't give Trump the power to unleash more `mayhem,' Colorado voters tell Supreme Court

WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump is making a political, not a legal, argument for why the Supreme Court should allow him on the ballot, lawyers for the Colorado voters challenging his qualifications said in a court filing Friday.

Trump is “not-so-subtly” threatening there will be “bedlam” if he is not on the ballot, the lawyers said.

“But we already saw the `bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost,” they wrote in their main brief ahead of the Supreme Court taking up the case Feb. 8.

At issue is the wording of the Constitution's insurrection clause and whether Trump incited an insurrection when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

That amendment was included “precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again,” lawyers for the Colorado voters argue.

Six Republican and unaffiliated voters successfully sued to keep Trump off the ballot for Colorado’s March 5 election. After a divided state Supreme Court upheld that decision, it was put on hold while Trump makes his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump, in his main filing last week, said ballot-disqualification efforts “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam.” He urged the court to put a “swift and decisive end” to the efforts in Colorado and around the country.

Trump’s legal arguments include that the insurrection provision of the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to the presidency. And even if it does, Trump’s lawyers wrote, “he did not `engage in’ anything that qualifies as `insurrection.’”

Attorneys for the other side said Trump summoned and incited an angry crowd to disrupt the certification of his electoral defeat.

“The most violent attack on our nation’s Capitol since the War of 1812—an attack which obstructed the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in American history—meets any plausible definition of `insurrection against the Constitution,’” they wrote. “It would make no sense to adopt a legal standard that gives a free pass to those – like Trump here – most responsible for an insurrection.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Colorado voters tell Supreme Court Trump is disqualified from ballot