Guess Who Hasn’t Said a Single Word on Colorado’s Trump Ballot Decision?
Top Senate Republicans don’t seem all that outraged by Colorado’s decision to kick Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot.
A pair of Republican leaders have stayed noticeably mum on the Colorado Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 election ballot.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator John Thune—the number two Republican in the upper chamber—haven’t made a peep about the state judiciary’s historic decision that would effectively prevent the GOP front-runner from winning a single Colorado vote, on the basis that Trump violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment when he spawned an insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The pair’s silence suggests that the Republican anti-Trumpers foresee a better Republican Party without the wannabe despot, who is currently leading the GOP primaries by more than 50 points above his runner-up, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to aggregated polling data by FiveThirtyEight.
When the Senate voted to acquit Trump of his impeachment charges, McConnell only agreed to do so on a technicality, arguing that Trump had already left office by the time they were arguing its merits in the Senate in February 2021.
“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said at the time.
Thune, meanwhile, has argued that when Trump wins, Republicans lose.
But others have taken note of the pair’s recent silence—including Trump’s family.
“Mitch McConnell, John Thune and John Cornyn remain silent. Of the 4 most senior members of Senate Republican leadership, Barrasso is the only one with the courage to weigh in against what the radical left is trying to do to my father,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, referring to the Senate GOP conference chairman.
The Colorado court’s decision is the first in U.S. history to keep a candidate, let alone a presidential one, off the ballot. Its ruling has now put immense pressure on the federal Supreme Court, which, after taking on several high-profile abortion cases, has already primed itself to play a pivotal role in the 2024 election cycle.
Despite that, the Colorado ruling could also prove majorly influential to courts and election officials considering similar measures in other states, potentially narrowing the ability for Trump to win a majority in the first place.