A number of blue states are proposing laws that would prevent a candidate from appearing on the presidential ballot unless he releases his tax returns.
This would be an interesting Constitutional issue - whether a state can pass a law that restricts a candidate’s presence on the ballot this way in a presidential election.
When are they going to realize that the only way to defeat Trump is to fucking vote him out? I’m suffering from “desperate loophole fatigue” here…talk about trying to squeeze blood from a proverbial stone.
The courts seemed to help defeat some of Trump’s initiatives, also some resistance of congress and the states. Impeachment is also a legal option. Not to mention that God could take him out in a heartbeat. All legit ways besides voting that could end his initiatives or reign.
Seems like a bill of attainder
The states that could pull this off are probably not states that Trump would carry anyway, I would imagine, so it might not make any difference.
How? It has no retroactive effect and imposes no penal liability.
If passed, it says “This is a condition for you to be in the ballot next year.”
There may be issues with it, but not seeing the connection to attainder.
I think it’s probably legal: After all, states already do have plenty of other laws limiting ballot access by various criteria, and it seems like a state itself would be the ultimate authority on what basis the state is allowed to use to limit ballot access.
But that said, it’s probably bad optics and hence politically unwise.
In no way does this ban Trump from running for president anymore than it would ban anyone else from running for the office.
For Trump. It would hurt down ballot Republicans though. I very liberal and I think that it’s a chickenshit move.
Totally agree - complete chickenshit move and I’m not liberal nor a Trump fan…you want him out of office? Fine, get a candidate that can beat him, that’s what people want, not some stupid loophole crap that pisses off logical/reasonable people and gives a platform for his supporters to scream about…
Good point. Then I suppose those down-ballot Republicans might even pressure Trump to release his taxes. The real Trump butt-lickers might even have to run a real campaign.
If the intent is to keep Trump off the ballot, that is indeed dumb. If the intent is to force him to release his taxes, that won’t work, either. However, if the intent is a state-led attempt to make it a requirement for future presidents, then I’m all on board.
Keeping Trump off the ballot accomplishes nothing. I don’t think it would even mess up downballot races, as that would only work if Republicans refused to vote entirely. I suspect Trump’s fervent supporters would write him in, and the rest would simply not vote, or even vote for his opponent, but still vote for Republicans. There is no way the Republicans would push a “boycott the ballot” drive, so that won’t happen.
And I think Congress getting his taxes makes more sense than expecting this to force Trump to release them. And, come on. If they want to leak them to the public, it’s not hard to do. Hell, get some Trump appointed person involved, and everyone will just assume it was their fault.
If voting against him was a viable option, he wouldn’t be President now.
I know there are differing opinions on the matter but I am doubtful of its constitutionality.
In a Supreme Court case Torcaso v Watkins the court was confronted with a challenge to a state law that placed a restriction on office holders to profess a belief in God. The court unanimously overturned that state law but not on the No Religious Test clause. Instead the court ruled:
The court did ground their judgment in Torcaso in the First Amendment Freedom of Religion, but one of the few lines of reasoning that the justices could agree upon was that states could not pose an additional requirement on officeholders.
Further, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton the high court ruled that states cannot set limits on qualifications for Congressional office, term limits in that case, beyond what is in the Constitution. The state law it specifically overruled was a provision in the Arkansas state constitution that barred ballot access for Congressional races to those who had served more than the specified limit in Congress already. It would not be a hard leap of logic to apply such prohibition on state created limits to the qualifications to hold the office of the President.
Technically, it wouldn’t be banning Trump from running for President. It would just be some states banning him from appearing on the ballots in that state because he didn’t comply with that state’s election laws. Which is something states do all the time now. Granted, the candidates from the two major parties don’t usually get left off the ballots.
In New York, for example, there were four presidential candidates on the 2016 ballots; Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein. There were several other people running - Darrell Castle, Rocky De La Fuente, Richard Duncan, Rocky Giordani, James Hedges, Tom Hoefling, Chris Keniston, Alyson Kennedy, Laurence Kotlikoff, Gloria La Riva, Mike Maturen, Evan McMullin, Monica Moorehead, Rod Silva, Peter Skewes, Mimi Soltysik, Dan Vacek, and Jerry White - but none of them met the legal standards to be on the ballot in New York.
But, again, we have to keep in mind that neither Trump nor anyone else is “running for President” on any state ballot. When you see the name Trump on the ballot and mark it, state law says that means that you are voting for the slate of electors on file in the state election official’s office who have pledged to vote for Trump. The office that is being voted upon is elector.
The Constitution imposes qualifications on electors as well, so it seems that Thornton would apply equally as well by prohibiting a state from denying ballot access to an elector who had pledged to vote for particular candidate as that is an additional qualification the Constitution does not require.
However, states do this all of the time. If I am a citizen of state X, and in all ways meet the Constitutional requirements for elector, but I pledge for, say, Rick Perry, then there is no way I can get on the ballot. But that is fair, you might say, because that is simply a ballot access law designed to weed out candidates who do not have a chance and make the ballot manageable lest a state be required to list hundreds and hundreds of crackpots. Fine.
But what if I want to be an unpledged elector and I think that enough people will trust my good judgment to vote for me and let me vote in the EC how I choose? As there is no mechanism to allow me to do that, isn’t the state adding an extra qualification?
However, I do agree with your point. The Supreme Court has upheld ballot access laws for administrative reasons and/or to keep the ballot manageable, but has clearly shut down the attempt to do so because of policy disagreements. This is only about two steps removed from saying that no presidential candidate can qualify for the ballot unless he is a Republican, taken a pledge to support a balanced budget amendment, or any number of things.
An interesting side effect of this is that Trump could win the Electoral College narrowly but lose the popular vote nationwide by a staggering margin - say, 15 or 20 percent.
Theoretically possible, but unlikely. To do so, he would have to capture all of the large states like New York and California, which are reliably blue.
This seems so obviously short-sighted, I’m surprised there’s not more / stronger opposition to it from Dems.
What’s keeping a state like Ohio or Wisconsin from doing the same thing to a Democratic candidate for whatever reason? Do you really want to go down this road, and do you want to give Republicans this idea? Seems like an insane strategy to me.