Neil Gorsuch Is Liberals' New Favorite Weapon Against Donald Trump

A past ruling by conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is proving to be a potential hazard to Donald Trump's reelection chances after a second state decided to remove the former president from its primary ballot based on a 2012 decision by Gorsuch.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, removed Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot on Thursday, citing the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Lawsuits have been filed in dozens of states seeking to block the former president from running in 2024 over accusations that he participated in an insurrection during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump has now been removed in two states. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last week that Trump was guilty of insurrection and ineligible to run for public office. The seven-person Colorado high court, where all justices were appointed by Democratic governors, blocked Trump in a 4-3 decision.

Both cases are unprecedented, and the former president has maintained that he is innocent of the accusations against him, claiming that removing him from the primary ballot is a form of election fraud. Trump is also the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, and primary voters are set to start casting their ballots next month.

Each decision to remove Trump had some overlap. Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court agreed that the former president influenced his supporters' decision to mob the U.S. Capitol in an effort to block the certification of President Joe Biden's election.

Both cases also relied on a previous ruling by Gorsuch, a Trump-appointed justice who ruled prior to serving on the U.S. Supreme Court that a state is allowed to exclude candidates from its ballot if it is in the interest of "protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process."

The 2012 ruling, Hassan v. Colorado, was focused on former presidential candidate Abdul Karim Hassan, a naturalized citizen who argued that Section II of the U.S. Constitution, which says that only natural-born citizens can run for the office of the presidency, violated his rights to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

A Colorado magistrate judge ruled against Hassan's lawsuit that challenged the state for blocking his name from appearing on the 2012 ballot, and Gorsuch, a U.S. circuit judge at the time, upheld the decision. Gorsuch also dismissed Hassan's argument that even if he was ineligible for the president, it was unlawful for Colorado to exclude him from the ballot.

"But, as the magistrate judge's opinion makes clear and we expressly reaffirm here, a state's legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office," Gorsuch wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in on Trump's ballot case in Colorado, potentially putting Gorsuch's previous ruling in the spotlight. Attorney and legal commentator Elie Mystal said during an appearance on MSNBC that he expects SCOTUS to overturn the decision in Colorado but pointed out that the state justices were "so aware" of what the federal high court "was about to do...that they literally quoted Neil Gorsuch when he was sitting in the federal circuit court in Colorado."

"That's a Gorsuch opinion that they quote in the thing, so if Gorsuch had any logical consistency he would likely uphold the Colorado state court's opinion, but what we're about to see if just how again hypocritical and unserious this Supreme Court is when it comes to protecting their partisan sugar daddies like Donald Trump," Mystal added.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's campaign via email for comment.