The decision of Maine’s secretary of state that Donald Trump cannot appear on the presidential primary ballot is part of an unfolding and unprecedented political crisis in the United States. Maine becomes the second US state to declare that Trump is ineligible to return to the White House because of his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill, which sought to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Maine action, announced Thursday, follows the decision of the Colorado state Supreme Court, which ruled December 19 that Trump had violated his oath of office by mobilizing his supporters and unleashing them against Congress. He sought to disrupt the official certification of the Electoral College vote, won by Democrat Joe Biden by a margin of 306-232. Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million.
Ex-President Donald Trump speaks during a rally Sunday, Dec. 17, 2023, in Reno, Nevada. [AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez]
Section Three of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution declares anyone ineligible to hold office who has previously sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and then violated it. The Colorado court found that Trump clearly did so on January 6. The 34-page decision issued by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, closely tracks the Colorado ruling and cites it repeatedly.
Bellows writes:
I am mindful that no secretary of state has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.
Court suits and other legal and administrative proceedings aiming to prevent Trump from appearing on the ballot are underway in more than a dozen states, according to press tabulations. This week, the Wisconsin Elections Commission recused itself from hearing a suit against placing Trump on the ballot, while the California secretary of state declined to remove him from the ballot. In both states the issue will now be taken up in the courts.
Trump has yet to defeat a single challenge on the basis of the substance of the issues. Those courts and state election authorities that have rejected challenges to his ballot status—the majority so far—have done so exclusively on procedural grounds, mainly based on findings that the issue must be decided in the federal courts, not by the states.
Such findings, and the conflicting decisions in various states, mean that the issue will inevitably find its way to the US Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, including three out of nine who owe their positions to Trump himself. The very fact that the highest US court must step in to decide who can be on the presidential ballot is an indication of the extremity of the political crisis.
Red circles denote US states where challenges to Trump's ballot status are being considered by the courts or state election authorities, including: Alaska (AK), Arizona (AZ), California (CA), Colorado (CO), Maine (ME), Michigan (MI), Minnesota (MN), Nevada (NV), New Jersey (NJ), New Mexico (NM), New York (NY), Oregon (OR), South Carolina (SC), Texas (TX), Vermont (VT), Virginia (VA), West Virginia (WV), Wisconsin (WI) and Wyoming (WY).
The normal political processes of American capitalism—congressional elections every two years, presidential elections every four years, political campaigns run by the two capitalist parties and declared legitimate by their allies in the corporate media—are breaking down. They can no longer contain the political tensions erupting in the United States, whose source is not the personality of Trump but far deeper social and historical processes.