Maine’s top court isn’t getting involved in Donald Trump’s ballot appeal just yet — but that doesn’t mean the court is saying Trump is eligible for office. Rather, the court declined on procedural grounds to take up the appeal ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision in the Colorado eligibility case.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows decided last month that Trump can’t appear on the state’s primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection after swearing to support the Constitution. A judge then kept the decision on hold and sent the case back to Bellows for her to issue a new ruling after the U.S. justices decide the Colorado case.
Bellows appealed to Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court, but on Wednesday that court said it’s too soon for it to get involved, noting that the judge had sent the case back to Bellows. The court added:
If we were to issue a final decision, only then to learn from the Supreme Court that, for instance, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is not self-executing or that all findings regarding insurrection must be reached by a higher standard of proof than the Secretary of State applied, a flurry of court activity would ensue in an effort to reopen the decision of the Secretary of State or seek independent judicial relief, causing delay that the existing interlocutory order might avoid.
To be clear, this ruling isn’t an endorsement of Trump’s (or Bellows’) position on the merits of the former president’s eligibility. The Maine court just doesn’t want to issue a ruling now, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Colorado case could upend it. As for what that Colorado ruling will bring, we’ll get a better sense when the U.S. justices hear arguments on Feb. 8. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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