In the wake of Colorado’s top court ruling that Donald Trump should no longer be allowed on the ballot, the former president’s Republican challengers have all come out in support of the president.
For example, Vivek Ramaswamy has announced that he will be withdrawing from the primary in Colorado if Trump cannot contend for the delegates there.
“I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country,” Ramaswamy said in a statement.
ABC News wrote:
Ramaswamy’s statements came shortly after the Colorado Supreme Court decided on Tuesday evening that Trump is disqualified from running for the GOP presidential nomination in their state because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says former officeholders cannot run again if they’ve engaged in insurrection against the U.S.
Colorado’s high court said Trump engaged in insurrection due to his activity surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. A Trump spokesperson said they would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Shortly before pledging to remove himself from Colorado’s primary ballot in solidarity with Trump, Ramaswamy told ABC News that while it would admittedly be easier to win without the front-runner in the race, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling against the former president strikes him as “appalling for the future of our country.”
“And to tell you the truth, it would be a lot easier for me to get elected if Trump wasn’t in this race, but that’s not – it’s not about me, and it’s not about another candidate,” Ramaswamy said, speaking to ABC News after his campaign event in Garner, Iowa. “This is wrong. And I think that this is a flagrant violation of the rule of law.”
Ron DeSantis has also criticized the ruling. The Florida governor decried the ruling, saying that “The Left invokes ‘democracy’ to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds.”
The Left invokes “democracy” to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse. https://t.co/D4pCzZ7FhY
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) December 20, 2023
Even Chris Christie, a noted Trump hater who has made preventing the former president from reclaiming the White House, said that the Colorado court was in the wrong. The New Jersey governor said that Trump shouldn’t be prevented from the presidency from a court, but by the people.
Haley also took Christie’s tack, saying, “I will tell you that I don’t think Donald Trump needs to be president. I think I need to be president. I think that’s good for the country. But I will beat him fair and square. We don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions.”
“I want to see this in the hands of the voters,” Haley later continued. “We’re going to win this the right way, we’re going to do what we need to do but the last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot.”
