MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said Tuesday on “The ReidOut” that if the Supreme Court upholds the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court that former President Donald Trump is not eligible to appear on the state’s ballot, he could be taken off the ballot in multiple states.
Maddow said, “I mean, if the Supreme Court were to affirm this ruling, he could be disqualified not just in Colorado but multiple states like the stakes couldn’t be higher. As you say they define themselves as originalists. What is originalism mean? It means, in my layman’s take on it, it’s a fairytale, but if you listen to the way that they talk about it, it’s that there’s no interpretation. Essentially that, all they’re doing is applying the language of the Constitution as the people who wrote that language intended it in their own time. ”
She continued, “I do think the justices want just not to think of them as political actors, but I think we understand that they are and they have politics that are in some ways quite discernible for some of them and the others it’s a little critic. How do they feel about Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party becomes a very hot question right now.”
Maddow added, “I mean, I will just raise one other issue. I mentioned this before, but the idea of a healthy democracy, nevertheless, having some sort of disqualifying process, an adjudicated process by which some people and some parties even are prohibited from participating in democratic competition because their point, because what they’ve shown, their track record or platform is anti-democratic in nature, is a thing. That happens all over the world. It happens in our own history in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”
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