GOP rallies around Trump after Colorado ballot ruling
His Republican primary rivals said they want to beat him, but not this way.
Republicans rallied around Donald Trump on Tuesday after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the former president was ineligible for reelection because he stoked an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel blasted the ruling as “election interference” in a post on X, writing that the party’s legal team “looks forward to helping fight for a victory.”
“Like the rest of the unprecedented, constant and illegal election interference against President Trump, this will backfire and further strengthen President Trump's winning campaign to Save America," House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik said in a statement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also threw his weight behind the former president and rejected the ruling, calling it “nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack.”
Trump’s primary competitors joined the fray, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has staked his campaign on positioning himself as a foil to Trump.
Christie, answering a question at a town hall in Bedford, New Hampshire, said the ruling was “probably premature” because Trump hasn’t been tried for inciting insurrection.
“I do not believe Donald Trump should be prevented from being president of the United States by any court. I think he should be prevented from being president of the United States by the voters of this country,” Christie said, adding that he had not yet had a chance to read the ruling that came out while he was en route to his campaign event.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley echoed Christie's remarks. "We don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions," she said in Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register.
She added at a campaign event: "We’re going to win this the right way."
Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to withdraw his name from the Colorado primary ballot and encouraged his opponents to do the same.
“The Framers of the 14th Amendment would be appalled to see this narrow provision—intended to bar former U.S. officials who switched to the Confederacy from seeking public office—being weaponized by a sitting President and his political allies to prevent a former President from seeking reelection,” Ramaswamy wrote in a social media post.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another of Trump's primary rivals, also attacked what he saw as judicial overreach. "The Left invokes 'democracy' to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse," he wrote on a post on X.
GOP Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were among the many other Republicans to denounce the ruling on social media.
“This is extreme judicial activism that is designed to suppress the vote and voices of hundreds of thousands of Coloradans, which is absolutely unacceptable,” Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert said in a post to X.
Kari Lake, who famously refused to concede her loss in the 2022 Arizona governor race, called for the Supreme Court to block the state court’s ruling.
Shortly after the ruling was announced, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign said that the former president would file an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lisa Kashinsky, Kelly Garrity and Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed to this report.
