Politics

Supreme Court appears wary of blocking Trump from Colorado ballot

Published

11 months ago

February 17, 2024

Supreme Court appears wary of blocking Trump from Colorado ballot

WASHINGTON —

The Supreme Court justices gave a favorable hearing to former President Trump on Thursday, suggesting they will clear the way for him to seek election this year despite the mob attack on the Capitol that followed his loss in 2020.

The justices, both conservative and liberal, said they were skeptical of giving individual states the constitutional authority to disqualify candidates for a national office like the presidency.

“Why should a single state make this determination for the rest of the nation?” Justice Elena Kagan said. “It sounds awfully national.”

“It just doesn’t seem like a state call,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett added.

In December, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first and so far only state or federal court to rule that Trump must be removed from the primary ballot because he is not qualified to hold office again.

By a 4-3 vote, the state judges said Trump had violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says no person may “hold any office, civil or military” after having taken an oath to support the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection” against the United States.

“We are here because, for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation’s Capitol came under violent assault. For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power,” said Denver attorney Jason Murray, who represented the Colorado voters who sued to disqualify Trump.

But he quickly ran into steadily skeptical questions from the justices. They spent little time on whether Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6 amounted to engaging in an insurrection.

Instead, they took turns disputing the notion that state judges in Colorado or elsewhere may decide whether a presidential candidate is qualified.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the 14th Amendment was adopted by the Reconstruction Congress to limit the authority of the states. “Wouldn’t that be the last place that you’d look for authorization for the states, including the Confederate states, to enforce the presidential election process?” he asked.

He predicted that if the high court were to endorse the Colorado ruling, other states “in very quick order” would make their own decisions on who can run for president, and some of them may seek to disqualify Democrats.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh repeatedly cited an 1869 decision holding that Congress had to pass a law to enforce the 14th Amendment’s disqualification rule. It was not up to each state, he said.

He also noted that while federal law makes it a crime to “incite an insurrection,” Trump had not been charged under that law.

The tenor of Thursday’s argument suggests a solid majority of the court, and perhaps all nine justices, will rule for Trump and reverse the Colorado court’s decision.

Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded as though she may vote against Trump.

The court with Roberts taking the lead is likely to turn out an opinion in a few weeks. March is the prime time for primary elections in much of the nation.

By next week, however, the justices will have before them another Trump appeal that could decide whether he goes on trial this spring for the Jan. 6 attack.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s claim that former presidents are immune from being prosecuted for their actions while in office. The appellate judges said they would keep the criminal case on hold until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear Trump’s appeal of that ruling.

If the justices quickly reject Trump’s appeal, his trial may be scheduled to begin in April or May. But if the justices decide to hear the appeal, the trial is likely to be postponed until late summer or fall.

Leading up to Thursday’s argument, some legal experts portrayed the disqualification issue as a test of the conservative court’s devotion to originalism.

Legal scholars and historians told the justices in friend-of-the-court briefs that the words and history of the 14th Amendment call for disqualifying Trump. They said the members of the Reconstruction Congress were determined to prevent insurrectionists from gaining power and subverting American democracy.

But the six conservatives are also GOP appointees, and Trump’s lawyers said it would be anti-democratic to remove the Republican presidential front-runner from the ballot.

And that argument appeared to resonate with most of the justices, including its three Democratic appointees.

The former president is “the presumptive Republican nominee and the leading candidate for president of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers said in their closing brief filed on Monday. “The American people — not courts or election officials — should choose the next president of the United States. Yet at a time when the United States is threatening sanctions against the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela for excluding the leading opposition candidate for president from the ballot … [the Colorado lawsuit] asks this court to impose that same anti-democratic measure at home.”

Much of Thursday’s argument was devoted to procedural and technical objections to the Colorado ruling.

In his legal argument for Trump, Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell said the president is not “an officer of the United States” and is therefore not covered by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. He said that officers are appointed, not elected, and that the 14th Amendment does not mention the president or vice president.

Many historians and legal scholars call this claim absurd.

It would mean the Reconstruction Congress sought to block former Confederates from holding “any office” across the nation except the presidency.

But by the argument’s end, it appeared the justices will decide the case without ruling on whether the former president was covered by the 14th Amendment or whether he led an insurrection before leaving office.

Politics

Trump Begins Selling New Meme Coin Days Ahead of Inauguration

Published

5 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Trump Begins Selling New Meme Coin Days Ahead of Inauguration

President-elect Donald J. Trump and his family on Friday started selling a cryptocurrency token featuring an image of Mr. Trump drawn from the July assassination attempt, a potentially lucrative new business that ethics experts assailed as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.

Disclosed just days before his second inauguration, the venture is the latest in a series of moves by Mr. Trump that blur the line between his government role and the continued effort by his family to profit from his power and global fame. It is yet another sign that the Trump family will be much less hesitant in this second term to bend or breach traditional ethical boundaries.

Mr. Trump himself announced the launch of his new business on Friday night on his social media platform, in between announcements about filling key federal government posts. He is calling the token $Trump, selling it with the slogan, “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”

The venture was organized by CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, which already has been selling an array of other kinds of merchandise like Trump-branded sneakers, fragrances and even digital trading cards.

But this newest venture brings Mr. Trump and his family directly into the world of selling cryptocurrency, which is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Trump recently disclosed he intended to name a cryptocurrency advocate as S.E.C. chairman.

A disclosure on the website selling the tokens says that CIC Digital and its affiliates own 80 percent of the supply of the new Trump tokens that will be released gradually over the coming three years and that they will be paid “trading revenue” as the tokens are sold.

The move by Mr. Trump and his family was immediately condemned by ethics lawyers who said they could not recall a more explicit profiteering effort by an incoming president.

“It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office” said Adav Noti, executive director of Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit ethics group. “It is beyond unprecedented.”

Eric Trump, who helps run Trump Organization business operations, said on Saturday that this offering was part of a new and growing business sector that the Trump family has entered.

“I am extremely proud of what we continue to accomplish in crypto,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. “$Trump is currently the hottest digital meme on earth.” He added: “This is just the beginning.”

But even some in the cryptocurrency industry were quick to criticize the new token.

“Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it,” wrote Nick Tomaino, a crypto venture capitalist and former executive at Coinbase, one of the largest crypto trading platforms, in a social media posting on Saturday.

The president-elect and his three sons had, as of late last year, already lent their name to another cryptocurrency startup called World Liberty Financial, an arrangement that included a cut of token sales for the Trump family in exchange for helping promote the new brand.

But the members of the Trump family, with World Liberty Financial, were not actually owners of the platform or officers in the company.

There are other crypto currency coins in the marketplace based on Mr. Trump that are not directly affiliated with his family like the new Trump Meme. Typically, these so-called meme coins — which were born when coins were created as a joke inspired by an internet meme or cartoonish animal faces — are largely worthless and traded more like a hobby.

With this new venture, companies associated with Mr. Trump’s family have a direct financial stake in the value of the new tokens and in the volume of their sales, which quickly surged after going on the market.

“GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency,” the venture’s website says, adding, “Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP.’”

The legal disclosures say the tokens are not intended to be seen as “an investment opportunity, investment contract or security of any type.” But trading of them on cryptocurrency markets began immediately, driving up the value of each token from $7 to nearly $30 as of noon on Saturday.

This suggested that the so-called fully diluted value of all the tokens as of Saturday at noon was $30 billion, a number achieved less than a day after the token went on the market, according to CoinMarketCap, a site that tracks cryptocurrency trading.

Mr. Trump and his family are clear in the marketing of the new token that the image picked for the coin had been inspired by the July assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.

“President Trump faced death and came up fighting!” the website promoting the tokens says.

Cryptocurrency markets tend to be highly volatile, in part because tokens are not backed by any tangible assets. The website for Mr. Trump’s new venture includes an extensive collection of disclaimers limiting the ability of anyone buying the token to file a class-action lawsuit related to it and warning buyers that “Trump Memes may be extremely volatile, and price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies could impact the price.”

Mr. Trump has already made clear that he will be working to promote the cryptocurrency industry.

He has announced his intention to appoint regulators who will lift restrictions on the sale of new tokens and ties between cryptocurrency companies and other more traditional financial enterprises.

This stands in contrast to efforts by Biden-era regulators to tightly regulate the industry, out of a concern that a sudden crash in the value of cryptocurrency could potentially lead to a future financial crash.

Politics

Thousands of left-wing demonstrators descend on Washington to protest Trump inauguration

Published

6 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Thousands of left-wing demonstrators descend on Washington to protest Trump inauguration

Thousands of mainly female protesters descended on Washington, D.C. to protest President–elect Trump’s inauguration on Monday. However, the crowd is only a tenth of the half a million who turned out for the “Women’s March” in 2017.

Saturday’s march, rebranded as the “People’s March,” is taking place at three different locations with demonstrators advocating for a wide range of left-wing causes and showcasing a united front to the new administration.

This morning, a kickoff event took place in Franklin Park for “gender justice” and bodily autonomy, and then demonstrators walked downtown before making their way towards the Lincoln Memorial for the day’s main event.

Demonstrators participate in the “People’s March” on Washington January 18, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Activists were rallying in opposition to the incoming Trump administration’s policy objectives two days before the presidential inauguration. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

HIGHLIGHTS FROM PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP’S 1ST INAUGURATION DAY; WHAT TO EXPECT FROM MONDAY

“It’s really healing to be here with all of you today in solidarity and togetherness, in the face of what’s going to be some really horrible extremism,” Mini Timmaraju, the head of advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told the crowd as events kicked off.

Other protesters gathered at two other parks also near the White House, with one group focused on democracy and immigration and another on local Washington issues,

Vendors hawked buttons that said #MeToo and “Love trumps hate,” and sold People’s March flags for $10. Demonstrators carried posters that read “Feminists v. Fascists” and “People over politics.”

Lillian Fenske, 31, drove six hours from Greensboro, North Carolina, to participate. Her signs expressed concern over oligarchs and the disunity. “America is not for sale,” said one, while another said simply, “Divided We Fall.”

Protestors representing a variety of rights groups attend the "People's March on Washington" on January 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Protesters representing a variety of rights groups attend the “People’s March on Washington” on January 18, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Activists were rallying in opposition to the incoming Trump administration’s policy objectives two days before the presidential inauguration. (Bryan Woolston/Getty Images)

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There is a heavy police presence, although law enforcement is not expecting a repeat of the violent scenes seen across the city ahead of Inauguration Day in 2017, where protesters shattered glass storefronts and torched cars, with police arresting more than 200 people in demonstrations that spanned several days.

The enthusiasm behind the so-called resistance movement to Trump has waned somewhat, with many progressive voters expressing feelings of exhaustion and disappointment following Trump’s landslide win in November. He dominated both the Electoral College and the popular vote to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris after a historic campaign cycle.

Demonstrators during the People's March,

Animated pro-choice and cliamte protesters holding signs at the march. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The 2017 Women’s March took place on the day after Trump’s inauguration. Celebrities like America Ferrera, Madonna, Ashley Judd, Cher, Katy Perry, Amy Schumer, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Michael Moore, Debra Messing, Patricia Arquette and others attended the march.

President-elect Trump is expected to leave Mar-a-Lago later today and head to Washington.

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Trump’s advisers have not detailed how he will spend the first part of the day, and the only public event on Trump’s schedule is an evening reception and fireworks show at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.

Donald Trump giving his inaugural address in 2017

President-elect Trump delivers his inaugural address on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017,, in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Sunday, there will be a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery and a “Make America Great Again” rally, at which Trump will deliver remarks, followed by a candlelit dinner.

Monday is Inauguration Day when Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance will participate in the swearing-in ceremony, which has been moved indoors due to the forecasted frigid temperatures.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Michael Dorgan is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.

You can send tips to michael.dorgan@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @M_Dorgan.

Politics

Harris joins a decades-old tradition for vice presidents in her final days in office

Published

6 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Harris joins a decades-old tradition for vice presidents in her final days in office

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris, in one of her last public appearances in the role, signed her ceremonial desk drawer at the White House on Thursday, a tradition that dates back nearly a century.

As a crush of current and prior staffers gathered in Harris’ formal office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, she thanked them for their “extraordinary commitment” to public service and prioritizing the hopes and dreams of the American people.

“We have each taken on a life and a calling that is about doing work in the service of others, and doing it in a way that is fueled yes with ambition, yes with a sense of almost stubbornness about not hearing no and knowing we can make a difference,” Harris said.

Kamala Harris’ and other vice presidents’ signatures on a desk drawer in Harris’ office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

Then, as Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff snapped pictures, Harris used a Sharpie to sign her desk drawer, a tradition that dates back to the 1940s and has been carried on continuously since the Ford administration. The vice president noted that she has met every one of her predecessors who signed the desk with the exception of Presidents Eisenhower and Truman.

As onlookers chanted, “MVP! MVP!” Harris, who unsuccessfully challenged President-elect Donald Trump for the White House in 2024, was asked what she planned to do next. Speculation about whether she would run for governor of California has been swirling.

“I’ll keep you posted,” she said, smiling.