Courts to consider lawsuits attempting to bar Trump from ballots over insurrection

A judge in Denver has started hearing arguments in a case brought by liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington aiming at removing Donald Trump from the ballot for inciting the January 6 insurrection. A lawyer for the former president argued the plaintiffs do not understand the meaning of the word “insurrection,” while the case could ultimately end up decided by the conservative-dominated supreme court. Hearings in the Colorado case are expected to continue through the week, while a judge in Minnesota will begin considering a similar lawsuit on Thursday.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• Joe Biden said an agreement to end the United Auto Workers’s strike against General Motors – and the six-week walkout against the Detroit automakers – was “great”.

• Trump remains at the top of the polls in Iowa, which isn’t really news. The most interesting tidbits of the survey may be Ron DeSantis’s remarkable favorability despite his overall floundering campaign, and Nikki Haley’s measurable jump in support.

• Never Trumper Asa Hutchinson’s campaign may be falling apart after his manager and confidante resigned, CBS News reports. Hutchinson is polling at 1% support in Iowa.

All the way back in July, the Guardian’s David Smith took a look at the prospects of the few Never Trumpers competing for the GOP’s presidential nomination, and concluded they were not good. Here’s more on the forces that derailed Mike Pence’s campaign and are hurting Asa Hutchinson’s:

For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all.

The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.

Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.

But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse. Hutchinson and Chris Christie, outspoken Trump critics, are polling in single digits, sowing doubts about voters’ appetite for change. Never Trumpers have reason to fear that his march to the Republican nomination may already be unstoppable.

“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”

Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is among the few Republican presidential candidates who have openly attacked Donald Trump, and his campaign now appears to be collapsing.

CBS News reports Hutchinson’s campaign manager and longtime confidante has resigned:

Republicans who have gone against the former president have gotten nowhere in this presidential election cycle. Hutchinson polled at 1% in the NBC News survey released this morning, and over the weekend, Mike Pence, who was Trump’s vice-president and fell out with him over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, suspended his presidential campaign.

Over the weekend, a federal judge reinstated a limited gag order on Donald Trump, intended to prevent him from making statements maligning those involved in his prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:

Donald Trump was once again bound by the gag order in the federal criminal case charging him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results, after a judge on Sunday reinstated restrictions prohibiting him from attacking prosecutors, court staff and potential trial witnesses.

The US district judge Tanya Chutkan also denied the former US president’s request to suspend the gag order indefinitely while his lawyers appealed.

Trump had been granted a reprieve when the judge temporarily lifted the gag order while she considered that request. Prosecutors argued last week that the order should be reimposed after Trump took advantage and posted a slew of inflammatory statements.

The statements included Trump’s repeated attacks on the special counsel Jack Smith, whom he called “deranged”, and Trump’s comments about the testimony that his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had provided to the grand jury during the criminal investigation.

Prosecutors argued that each of Trump’s statements were exactly the sort of comments that the order was designed to prevent, including intimidating or influencing witnesses who could wind up testifying against him at trial, and weighing on the substance of their testimony.

“The defendant has capitalized on the court’s administrative stay to, among other prejudicial conduct, send an unmistakable and threatening message to a foreseeable witness in this case,” prosecutors said in their brief. “Unless the court lifts the administrative stay, the defendant will not stop.”

Meanwhile, in Colorado, a lawyer for Donald Trump argued that efforts to remove him from the ballot rely on a faulty interpretation of the word “insurrection”.

See his reasoning here:

The UAW strike is part of a larger wave of union activism in recent months that has seen laborers win significant concessions from employers. Here’s more on that from the Guardian’s Steven Greenhouse:

Call it the Great Reset. Across the US, labor unions are winning surprisingly large contract settlements as workers have reset their expectations to demand considerably more than they did just a few years ago, and that has in turn pressured many corporations to reset – and increase – the pay packages they are giving in union contracts.

The result has been a wave of impressive – sometimes eye-popping – union contracts over the past year, far more generous than in recent decades. In August, 15,000 American Airlines pilots won pay increases of 46% over four years. In a huge labor confrontation last summer, 340,000 Teamster members at UPS won raises of $7.50 an hour over five years, with drivers’ pay climbing to $49 an hour and part-time workers receiving a pay increase of 48% on average.

After a three-day strike earlier this month, 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers won raises of 21%, as well as a $25 minimum wage for Kaiser’s workers in California. In March, 30,000 Los Angeles school district workers – bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teachers’ aides – won a 30% wage hike over four years. In Oregon, 1,400 nurses at Providence Portland hospital secured raises between 17% and 27% over two years.

Union leaders and rank-and-file workers hailed these contracts as great and historic, but Thomas Kochan, a longtime professor of industrial relations at MIT, put it another way: “All this reflects a a reset in expectations and wage norms for workers and for employers.

“These successes,” Kochan continued, “are a reflection of the workforce’s strong expectations and the workforce’s demands to make up for lost ground due to inflation – and to signal that times have changed. The modest wage increases of the past will no longer be adequate to deal with our situation.”

General Motors and the United Autoworkers have reached an agreement on a new contract that would end the six-week strike against the Big Three Detroit carmakers.

In a brief comment to reporters, Joe Biden called the development “great”. He has made supporting unions a priority of his administration, and last month traveled to Michigan to stand with UAW picketers.

Here’s more from the Guardian’s Michael Sainato on the agreement:

The United Auto Workers’ six-week strike against the US’s three largest automakers appeared to be coming to an end on Monday as the union brokered a deal with General Motors.

The agreement follows on the heels of deals with Ford and Stellantis, brokered in the past few days, effectively ending the first simultaneous strike against the three Detroit automakers.

The UAW strike has been the largest by car workers in decades, and has proved an unusual political flashpoint, with Donald Trump and Joe Biden supporting workers over the car companies.

Biden lauded the reported agreement reached with GM. “I think it’s great,” said Biden, who has touted himself as pro-union.

After the union reached a tentative agreement with Ford last week, Stellantis reached an agreement with similar contract terms on Saturday, and General Motors followed suit on Monday. The agreements include 25% wage increases for workers over the life of the contract and cost-of-living adjustments.

The first of what are expected to be five days of hearings in Colorado to determine if Donald Trump can appear on the ballot there is kicking off, and Politico has some details of what we can expect today:

Last year, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington succeeded in removing a New Mexico county commissioner from office for his role in the January 6 insurrection – a success the liberal group is trying to repeat with Donald Trump in Colorado. Here’s more on the 2022 case, from the Guardian’s Sam Levine:

A New Mexico official was removed from elected office on Tuesday for his role in the January 6 siege on the US Capitol, marking the first time a politician has lost their job for their involvement in the attack.

Couy Griffin, one of three commissioners in Otero county in southern New Mexico, was immediately removed from his position and cannot hold elected office again, Francis Mathew, a district judge in Santa Fe, wrote in his ruling.

The 14th amendment to the US constitution bars anyone who has participated in an insurrection from holding elected office. In June, Griffin was sentenced to 14 days in jail and a $3,000 (£2,604) fine for misdemeanor trespassing during the Capitol attack.

“Mr Griffin’s crossing of barricades to approach the Capitol were overt acts in support of the insurrection, as Griffin’s presence closer to the Capitol building increased the insurrectionists’ intimidation by number,” Mathew wrote in his ruling. “Mr Griffin aided the insurrection even though he did not personally engage in violence. By joining the mob and trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds, Mr Griffin contributed to delaying Congress’s election certification proceedings.”

Griffin told CNN he was “shocked” at the ruling and accused Mathew of being “tyrannical”.

“I’m shocked. Just shocked,” Griffin said. “I really did not feel like the state was going to move on me in such a way. I don’t know where I go from here.”

Could Donald Trump actually be booted off ballots in Colorado, Minnesota, and perhaps other states? The Guardian’s Sam Levine took a look at the cases in August, and here’s what he found:

As Donald Trump fights a mountain of criminal charges, a separate battle over his eligibility to run for president in 2024 is fast emerging.

The US constitution sets out just a handful of explicit requirements someone must meet to be the president. They must be at least 35 years old, a “natural-born” citizen, and a United States resident for at least 14 years. The constitution also bars someone who has served as president for two full terms from running again.

None of those requirements disqualify Trump, or anyone else charged with a crime, from running for federal office.

But one provision in the constitution, section 3 of the 14th amendment, makes things more complicated. It says that no person who has taken an oath “as an officer of the United States” can hold office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.

That language disqualifies Trump from running for office because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two prominent conservative scholars, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St Thomas, concluded in a much–discussed article to be published the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Sarah B Wallace, a district court judge in Denver, will spend the next five days weighing arguments over whether Donald Trump may stay on Colorado’s presidential ballots, or be removed over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, the Denver Post reports.

The case is a novel one, and there’s no telling if Trump’s enemies, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, will succeed, or if the supreme court will ultimately end up deciding the case.

Here’s more on what we can expect this week, from the Denver Post:

A provision in the Civil War-era federal constitutional amendment bars people who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office.

But there are key unresolved questions: Which actions meet that threshold? Who can enforce it? And what is the burden of proof necessary to bar someone from the ballot under that provision?

Those considerations will be heard by Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace.

“This isn’t a frivolous lawsuit,” said Doug Spencer, a University of Colorado law professor. He sees a “credible argument” that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in fact amounted to an insurrection, but he added that nothing is certain.

“The challenges, of course, are (that) when you’re litigating, every little word and technicality really matters,” Spencer said. “I think there are some real challenges with the plaintiffs prevailing in court.”

The civil suit was brought by several former and current Colorado Republicans, including some who are now unaffiliated voters. It’s spearheaded by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a liberal watchdog group.

Among the 14th Amendment ballot challenges being pursued against Trump in other states are cases in Minnesota and Michigan assisted by another group, called Free Speech for People. The Minnesota Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in that state’s case Thursday.

The Colorado suit, at its core, targets Trump on the basis that he allegedly urged on the Capitol siege and tried to overturn the election he lost in 2020. But it does so by also suing Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold — a Democrat who’s forthright in her assessment that Trump did incite an insurrection — because her office supervises elections and certifies the statewide ballot, making her the official who’d carry out any disqualification order.

Griswold first ran for her office in 2017 and has voiced concerns about threats to democracy during Trump’s presidency as a chief worry. But this case has put her in a position of taking a step back, at least as far as the nominal defendant can.

Her office isn’t putting on the case or providing evidence, beyond what’s asked of her and other officials. She sees the case as a way to ask the court for guidance when it’s not clear if a candidate is qualified for the ballot, a legal action available to voters.

“This case is a foundational case to one of the central tenets about the attack on democracy,” Griswold said in an interview. “Did Donald Trump disqualify himself by engaging in insurrection? That is what this case is about.”

If you missed it when it happened, here’s the Guardian’s Joanna Walters with the news that Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s former vice-president, had decided to end his ailing presidential campaign, further winnowing the Republican field:

Mike Pence, the former vice-president under Donald Trump, has suspended his campaign to become the Republican nominee for president in the 2024 election.

Pence announced at an event held by the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Saturday that he was dropping out of the race, in which he has been lagging, along with others, far behind frontrunner Trump.

“I came here to say it’s become clear to me this is not my time, so after much prayer and deliberation I have decided to suspend my campaign for president, effective today,” Pence said.

Pence, 64 and the former governor of his home state of Indiana, after representing it as one of its congressman, had been leading a struggling campaign for a while. He had not yet qualified for the third GOP debate on 8 November, falling short on required donations.

But his announcement on Saturday during an event attended by other prominent candidates for the party’s nomination next year, including Trump and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, came as a surprise to most.

Donald Trump has led almost every poll of the Republican presidential field for months, and a new survey released today of Iowa, the first state to vote in the party’s nomination process, shows that has not changed:

The poll was taken before Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president turned foe, dropped out this weekend, and shows the depth of the devotion to the ex-president’s cause:

At the start of the year, it seemed as though Florida governor Ron DeSantis would mount a strong challenge to Trump for the nomination, but his campaign has struggled to gain traction in recent months, and NBC’s survey shows his weak popularity ebbing further. That said, he has somehow managed to be the most well-liked candidate, even if most respondents plan to vote for Trump:

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is steaming ahead with his presidential run despite all the obstacles in front of him, particularly the four criminal indictments he is facing. But if liberal groups have their way, the former president will soon have another legal headache to deal with. This week, judges in two states will consider lawsuits to bar him from ballots for violating the constitution’s insurrection clause by trying to overturn the 2020 election and sparking the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to the Associated Press. Proceedings begin today in Colorado, and a judge will start hearing arguments Thursday in Minnesota.

It seems likely these suits will in some form make their way up to the supreme court, which is dominated by six conservative justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump. It’s unclear what will happen then, and we are unlikely to find out anytime soon, but it is possible these cases could become yet another source of legal peril for the former president.

Here’s what else we are watching today:

• Joe Biden will at 2.30pm eastern time hold an event dedicated “to advancing the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence”. After that, he will be hosting trick-or-treaters at the White House.

• Kamala Harris’s office is heavily promoting her interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes on Sunday evening, saying it demonstrates her “invaluable” leadership. You can watch it for yourself here.

• War continues in the Gaza Strip, and you can follow our live blog for the latest developments.