Lynn Schmidt

Round and round it goes; where it stops nobody knows. As our democracy is circling the drain, so go the rationales and excuses for not stopping former President Donald Trump from holding the highest office again. Americans should welcome the courts stepping in an attempt to stop the chaotic doom loop.

Just before Christmas, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency under the Constitution’s so-called insurrection clause and ordered the secretary of state to exclude his name from the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot. The landmark decision found that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from returning to the White House due to his conduct surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Critics of the decision cite the ruling as shutting down the democratic process and say the “only way to beat Trump is at the ballot box.” I disagree with that argument because Trump was already defeated at the ballot box in 2020 and it was his refusal to accept the results that led to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 and ushered the country down this path.

So let’s play that argument out. If Trump is the Republican nominee and loses the 2024 general election, is there anyone naive enough to think he will concede and accept the democratic results of another free and fair election? There would be no end to this vicious cycle.

One more example of Trump’s undemocratic unwillingness to accept his defeat came just three days after the Colorado Supreme Court ruling. Craig Mauger of the Detroit News published a story about a phone call which took place on Nov. 17, 2020, in which Trump reportedly pressured two GOP canvassers in Wayne County, Mich., not to certify the heavily Democratic county’s 2020 election results.

Trump reportedly said: “We’ve got to fight for our country… We can’t let these people take our country away from us… Everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” The RNC Chair and fellow Michigander Ronna McDaniel was also on the call. McDaniel reportedly told the two officials: “Do not sign it… We will get you attorneys.”

Ty Cobb, who once served as an attorney for Trump, told Politico’s Playbook he thought the phone-call recording was a “likely a violation of the federal honest services fraud statute,” and “shows the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the big lie.”

There is little reason to think Trump would not continue these illegal and immoral tactics should he lose again in 2024.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who relinquished his responsibility as a check and balance by refusing to convict Trump after his second impeachment in early 2021, also advocated back then that courts deal with Trump. McConnell suggested that the former leader of his party was still liable in criminal and civil court for his actions surrounding the deadly riot on Jan. 6.

Right after he voted to acquit the impeached Trump for inciting an insurrection, McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he stressed that impeachment was “never meant to be the final forum for American justice.”

“Put another way,” McConnell said, “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office.” Trump “didn’t get away with anything yet.”

But three years after the events of Jan. 6, Trump has still managed to get away with it. By leaving the judgment in the hands of voters again, Trump will continue to escape accountability.

The Colorado Supreme Court ballot case will most likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Especially since Maine’s secretary of state subsequently joined Colorado in barring Trump from the ballot. On the other hand, Michigan and California have decided Trump can remain on their ballots.

The U.S. Supreme Court is also likely to take up the case of whether Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. There is the federal Jan. 6 case in which Trump was indicted on four charges: one count of conspiracy to violate rights, one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, and one count each of obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so. There is also the Georgia election-interference trial.

Whether these cases and trials help Trump politically with Republican primary voters should not be a factor in whether they should either be heard or ruled upon. If as a country we believe in the rule of law, then we need to follow the rules of the law, under the guidance of the justice system.

While I am not predicting an outcome of the rulings by the highest court in our land or the jury trials, I embrace the opportunity for the courts to weigh in and potentially stop this illogical and illegal circularity.

Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.