Democrats, progressive groups and constituents in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District are keeping up the pressure on Republican U.S. Rep Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton as the GOP’s narrow House majority closes in on drastic federal budget cuts that could have a big impact in the battleground district.

More than 100 people gathered Thursday in a high school auditorium in Thornton for the latest in a series of “People’s Town Halls” organized by the Democratic National Committee across the country, in districts where Republican members of Congress have declined to hold in-person town halls themselves. In place of Evans, attendees asked questions of Rep. Greg Casar, a Democrat in his second term representing Texas’ 35th District.

“My title actually isn’t congressman. The title is representative,” Casar told the crowd. “And the person that is supposed to be representing you here in Colorado is not acting like a representative. He’s acting like an employee of the Trump-Musk organization, and he’s not going to show up and answer your questions.”

Casar and Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib shared the stage with a cardboard cutout of Evans — complete with chicken legs for a lawmaker who Rebecca Miller, a hospice nurse criticizing Evans’ support for Medicaid cuts, said was too “chicken” to hold a proper town hall.

“I’m sure you recognize my voice, since I call you at least once a week,” Miller told the cutout. “Hey Gabe, did you know that 25% of your constituents … are on Medicaid? That’s 73,000 people that you’re getting ready to kick off their health care.”

Evans and his fellow Republicans in Congress are pursuing a major rewrite of the federal budget, and have approved an initial plan calling for trillions of dollars in tax cuts paired with trillions more in cuts to spending programs, including $880 billion in cuts to be made by the committee that oversees Medicaid. That legislative effort has coincided with an unprecedented executive power grab by President Donald Trump’s administration, which has attempted to shut down congressionally-authorized agencies and departments, freeze spending programs, order mass layoffs of federal workers, and take other actions that run contrary to longstanding separation-of-powers principles in the U.S. Constitution.

After multiple House Republicans faced backlash from constituents over the GOP agenda during town halls earlier this year, party leaders advised their members to stop holding in-person events, Politico reported.

Evans, serving his first two-year term after defeating former Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo by about 2,500 votes in the 2024 election, appears to have listened. To date, he has held just a single telephone town hall, answering a select handful of questions on a call that many constituents reported was plagued by technical issues.

“They were told by House Speaker Mike Johnson not to have town halls, so they’re just doing what they’re told,” Casar said.

Though he represents one of the country’s most evenly divided congressional districts, Evans — a former Arvada police officer and Army veteran who served one term in the state Legislature before running for Congress — has done little to distance himself from Trump and his agenda. He has endorsed Trump’s plans to carry out the mass deportations of more than 12 million immigrants in the country without authorization and backed the president’s chaotic efforts to launch a global trade war.

In a statement, Delanie Bomar, an Evans spokesperson, called Casar a far-left activist “who wants to see socialism and transgenderism take over America.”

“He represents the total opposite of Congressman Gabe Evans’ commonsense and winning plan of improving public safety, the immigration system, and the economy,” Bomar said. “Any day with Greg Casar in Colorado’s 8th District is a day that helps re-elect Gabe Evans in 2026.”

With Evans absent, critics of the Republican agenda have sought to fill the vacuum with events of their own, including a March 22 event in Northglenn organized by local groups. Last month, more than 10,000 people turned out for a rally in Greeley to hear from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who taunted Evans from the stage for refusing to meet with his constituents.

Thursday’s town hall was jointly organized by the DNC and the Colorado Democratic Party. Two other events are planned for this weekend: a Medicaid-focused event organized by labor groups, scheduled for Friday evening at the Thornton Community Center; and a town hall at 10 a.m. on Saturday at the Moxie Theater in Greeley.

Medicaid cuts

The 8th District is Colorado’s most diverse — about 40% of its residents are Latino — and most competitive House seat. Drawn by an independent redistricting commission after the 2020 census awarded Colorado an additional congressional seat, it extends from Denver’s northern suburbs to Greeley and more rural areas in southern Weld County.

With Republicans holding just a three-vote majority in the House, the 8th District race could again prove crucial in determining control of Congress in the 2026 midterms. Caraveo earlier this month announced she would seek to win her old seat back next year, but first she faces a primary contest against Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel of Commerce City.

Murib said that despite Democrats’ relatively strong performance in Colorado in 2024, the loss of the 8th District race was a disappointment the party is eager to make up for next year.

“We are not going to let Gabe Evans continue to be employee of the month for Donald Trump,” Murib said. “We are not going to continue to let this cardboard cutout stay away from the people.”

Polls show that cuts to Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 1 in 5 Americans, are deeply unpopular, with 82% of Americans believing that funding for the program should be increased or kept the same, according to a March KFF survey.

Evans has defended House Republicans’ budget resolution, which mandates the $880 billion in cuts from the committee that oversees Medicaid spending, by falsely claiming that there are “a wide range of places where those cost savings can be found.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid comprises 93% of the spending that could be cut by the committee. As a result, the GOP’s budget requires a minimum of $700 billion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years — or a 10% reduction in projected spending.

Evans sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which will be responsible for implementing the Medicaid cuts required by the budget plan. Casar noted that with Republicans holding only a razor-thin majority, it would only require a handful of GOP House members to “replace the chicken legs with normal legs” to derail the budget plan.

“Your organizing from here over the course of the next few weeks could save Medicaid as we know it,” Casar said. “That’s why I got on a plane all the way over here to do this. … I know we can and will do it.”

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

It’s been three months since members of the 119th Congress were sworn in on Capitol Hill, and the U.S. Senate, especially, has been busy in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

A total of 41 Trump appointees have now been confirmed by the Republican-controlled upper chamber, including 21 out of 22 Cabinet-level positions. The Senate also passed a controversial short-term spending bill to fund the federal government through September, enacted new detention requirements for undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes and repealed a handful of Biden-era rules and regulations.With Republicans holding a 53-47 Senate majority, Democrats don’t have the votes to stop most of Trump’s agenda. But liberal and progressive activists have pressured Democratic senators, including U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, to do more to erect procedural hurdles, slow down Senate business and vote in blanket opposition to Trump nominees as a protest against the executive branch’s unprecedented power grab. The administration’s actions have included mass firings of federal workers, purges of prosecutors involved in criminal proceedings against Trump, and attempted funding freezes and agency shutdowns that run contrary longstanding separation-of-powers principles.

When it comes to Senate floor votes, neither Hickenlooper nor Bennet has heeded the activists’ calls. They have been among the Senate Democrats most likely to back Trump’s Cabinet picks, voting to confirm eight and 10 nominees, respectively, out of the 21 selected so far.

A more comprehensive database tracking 2025 Senate votes, including votes on lower-level appointees, procedural motions and legislation, tells a similar story. The tracker, maintained by Massachusetts-based progressive organizer Jonathan Cohn, tallied 155 votes by the full Senate through March 27.

When collated with 2024 election results, this vote data shows a clear, unsurprising pattern: Senate Democrats representing swing states are more likely than those in safe blue seats to cross the aisle and back Trump’s nominees and legislative priorities. For example, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona — elected narrowly in a state that Trump won by more than 5 percentage points last year — has voted with Republicans on almost 33% in 2025, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren of deep-blue Massachusetts has done so just 3% of the time.

The single biggest exception to this rule? Colorado and its moderate Senate duo, who have voted with Trump and their GOP colleagues roughly a quarter of the time while representing a state that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points in the 2024 election.

Through the end of March, Hickenlooper — who is serving his first six-year term and up for reelection in 2026 — has been the Democratic caucus’ number one outlier, voting with Trump’s agenda almost twice as often as would be expected, based on the state’s electorate. Bennet ranks sixth out of 47 Senate Democrats by the same metric.

In comparative terms, the Centennial State finds itself in 2025 with the electorate of true-blue Illinois, but the Senate representation of purplish-red Arizona. No other state with two Democratic senators has such a large disconnect between its partisan vote share and its Senate representation. No other state besides New Hampshire even comes close.

As Democrats and independents across Colorado have begun mobilizing in recent months to oppose Trump’s agenda, their disconnect with Hickenlooper and Bennet has been on full display on social media, at town halls and demonstrations and in a daily deluge of calls and messages to the senators’ offices.

Bennet has defended his votes to confirm some Trump appointees — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright — on the grounds that maintaining good relationships with leaders of important executive-branch agencies will help his constituents more than a stance of blanket opposition. He’s also argued that Democrats, after being “repudiated” in the 2024 election, have to “select our battles.”

A rapid political evolution

If such messages no longer resonate the way they once did with Colorado’s Democratic base, it’s largely because of the state’s rapid political evolution in recent years.

Both of Colorado’s senators entered state politics more than 20 years ago — Hickenlooper as a successful restaurateur elected mayor of Denver in 2003, and Bennet, a friend and fellow Wesleyan University graduate, as his chief of staff. At the time, Colorado was a traditional battleground that had veered to the right: Attorney General Ken Salazar was the only statewide Democratic elected official in a state otherwise dominated by Republicans.

As recently as 2016 — when Hickenlooper and Bennet were in their second terms as Colorado governor and U.S. senator, respectively — Colorado had tilted towards Democrats but could still lay claim to bellwether status, with Republicans like former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner able to win narrowly in favorable conditions for the GOP. But Trump’s rise abruptly ended that: In the last eight years, Democrats have gone 15 for 15 in statewide elections, winning their races by an average of more than 10 percentage points.

Much of that shift has been driven by voters in fast-growing cities and suburbs along the Front Range. Younger, left-leaning voters have moved to the state in droves. In 2024, even as Democrats lost ground in many states across the country, the party fared relatively well in Colorado, maintaining wide leads among suburban voters and even making gains in more rural areas on the Western Slope.

Political alignments like this don’t last forever. But in an era of nationally polarized politics, Trump has tanked the GOP’s electoral fortunes in Colorado, and for now, a wide gap — partly generational, partly ideological, but perhaps above all attitudinal — has opened up between the state’s two senators and many of its voters.

“Everyone out here, everyone I know — moderates, hardcore left people — they want someone who will fight,” Greeley resident Robert Casey told Bennet at a recent town hall. “And we need that.”

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice said in a court filing Monday that it will conduct a “review” of Colorado’s prosecution of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who was convicted of participating in a breach of secure voting equipment in an attempt to prove Trump’s lies alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

In a “statement of interest” submitted as part of a pending lawsuit filed by Peters in the U.S. District Court of Colorado, attorneys with the DOJ and the office of the U.S. District Attorney for Colorado wrote that the court should give “prompt and careful consideration” to Peters’ request for her immediate release from a Colorado jail, where she is serving part of a combined nine years behind bars in a sentence handed down by a Mesa County judge last year.

“Reasonable concerns have been raised about various aspects of Ms. Peters’ case,” said the two-page filing. “These concerns relate to, among other things, the exceptionally lengthy sentence imposed relative to the conduct at issue.”

The filing was signed by Yaakov Roth, acting assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Division; J. Bishop Grewell, the acting U.S. attorney for Colorado; and assistant U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly.

Peters was convicted by a Mesa County jury in August 2024 on a variety of criminal charges, including felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. The charges stemmed from her role in a scheme to allow an unauthorized person to enter the Mesa County’s elections department she oversaw, in order to make copies of election system software and capture images of passwords.

Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to eight and a half years of prison time in addition to a six-month stint in jail, citing the “immeasurable damage” that Peters had done to local elections and trust in the electoral process, her lack of remorse and other factors. She was transferred to the Larimer County Detention Center in December after expressing “concerns for her safety” in a Mesa County jail, and she is due to be transferred to Colorado Department of Corrections custody to serve her prison sentence.

Last month, Peters filed a federal lawsuit against Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Larimer County Sheriff John Feyen, asking the court to issue a writ of habeas corpus and order her “immediate release.”

The Trump DOJ’s “review” of the Peters case comes amid an unprecedented effort by the new administration to contravene criminal justice proceedings related to the president’s election conspiracy theories and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by a pro-Trump mob on the U.S. Capitol. That effort has included blanket pardons of roughly 1,500 people convicted in the Capitol attack and purges of prosecutors who handled many of those cases.

A spokesperson for Weiser said his office could not comment on an active case. The office of the U.S. attorney for Colorado also declined to comment.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

A potent blend of viral video clips, wild exaggerations and outright lies brewed by supporters of restrictionist immigration policy have made a Denver suburb an unlikely potential stage for the launch of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Trump was sworn into office for his second term on Monday, promising during his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda to deport immigrants “at a level nobody has ever seen before.” His first hours in office included a host of executive actions aimed at restricting border crossings, shutting down asylum applications, ousting the leadership of the federal immigration court system and more. Officials in the new administration outlined plans for an aggressive immigration crackdown in the days, weeks and months to come.

It’s the fulfillment of a 2024 presidential campaign defined by nationalist rhetoric and harsh, often baseless attacks on immigrants, including during an Oct. 11 stop on the outskirts of Aurora, where Trump repeated sensational falsehoods about a city that he said had been “invaded and conquered” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TdA.

Trump’s visit came weeks after a widely-circulated excerpt of surveillance footage showed alleged gang members entering a unit at an Aurora apartment complex while heavily armed, fueling claims by far-right local political figures who alleged, in the words of Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky, a “complete gang takeover of parts of our city.”

Such assertions were widely ridiculed by locals familiar with the sprawling and diverse municipality of Aurora, where over 400,000 residents occupy a 163-square-mile area extending from busy urban corridors near Denver to leafy subdivisions, golf clubs and hiking trails that spill into the Colorado prairie to the east. Police and city officials in Denver and Aurora have consistently said the TdA gang’s presence in the area is “isolated” and relatively small. Tenants in the apartments at the center of the controversy, while acknowledging some criminal activity, have pinned blame for the situation on an absentee landlord, CBZ Management, and they’re backed up by years of complaints documenting habitability issues at CBZ-owned properties long before migrants arrived.

Major GOP-led immigration measure passed by U.S. Senate, heads to House

None of that slowed the flood of lies and distortions from Trump and his allies. Trump cited Aurora twice during a Sept. 10 debate with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, and during his speech a month later at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center he promised to launch a new effort to “hunt down, arrest and deport” undocumented immigrants linked with crimes, which he said would be called “Operation Aurora.”

In the early hours of Trump’s second presidency, no official confirmation of such an operation had yet been made by federal law enforcement agencies. But community members and immigrant advocates were on edge as Trump proceeded with a spree of executive actions and vowed an unprecedented national crackdown.

“Our communities thrive when everyone — regardless of immigration status — can live with dignity, safety, and the freedom to pursue their dreams,” Henry Sandman, co-executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said in a statement Monday. “Together, we will defend every family and every neighbor from policies rooted in hate.”

“The city, including the Aurora Police Department, focuses on enforcing state and local law and does not have a federal immigration function,” Ryan Luby, a spokesperson for Aurora, told Newsline ahead of Trump’s inauguration. “As we always have, we will work with our federal partners and follow federal law and directives as they apply to our community.”

“Until the incoming administration is in office and we have had the opportunity to carefully review any finalized plans, it remains inappropriate for us to speculate on next steps,” Luby added.

“I worry for my neighbors. I worry for the people who, frankly, are the backbone of Aurora’s culture and economy,” Juan Marcano, a former Aurora City Council member and candidate for mayor, told Newsline in an interview Monday. “This is a horrific thing. They don’t deserve this.”

False claims and exaggerations

An estimated 40,000 migrants, many of them Venezuelans lawfully seeking asylum, arrived in the Denver metro area beginning in early 2023. New arrivals peaked in January 2024 before dropping off precipitously, according to data from Denver city officials. By one estimate, no other metro area in the country absorbed as many new arrivals per capita as the Mile High City and its neighbors, including Aurora.

Despite repeated claims by Trump and his allies that this influx of migrants led to “skyrocketing” crime rates, the opposite is true: Consistent with national trends, crime rates in Aurora, the Denver area and Colorado as a whole have declined since late 2022. Aurora recorded 37 homicides in 2024, the city’s lowest figure in four years, and overall rates of violent crime and property crime in the city continued to fall, according to data from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Studies have consistently shown that U.S. immigrants broadly, and undocumented immigrants specifically, commit crime at substantially lower rates than the native-born population.

The first claims of Venezuelan gang activity at three Aurora properties owned by CBZ Management appeared in a private report prepared by a Denver law firm conducting an investigation on behalf of the mortgage lender for one of the properties. The report was shared with city officials in July. All three CBZ-owned complexes had racked up years of city code violations over a wide range of habitability issues, and living conditions at one were bad enough that they even made local headlines as early as 2021.

In early August, as Aurora moved forward with plans to condemn one of the properties, a publicist hired by CBZ Management contacted local media to claim that the TdA gang had “taken over several communities in the Denver area,” and left “residents and building owners … in a state of fear and chaos,” according to an email obtained by the New York Times.

At the time, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican member of Congress, derided CBZ Management as a “slumlord” and said the claims about gang activity were “grossly exaggerated.” But Jurinsky — the most prominent of a handful of far-right Aurora political figures that also included former immigration official and GOP congressional candidate John Fabbricatore — made a series of national media appearances describing the “takeover” in lurid terms, alleging that gang members were “going block by block” and operating sentry networks that controlled access to the properties in question.

In late August, a 15-second video clip captured by a doorbell camera at one of the CBZ-owned complexes catapulted the story into the national spotlight. The footage showed a group of armed men knocking on an apartment door and entering the unit; law enforcement officials at the time declined to comment on the specifics of what the video may have shown, though a shooting was reported outside the complex the same night.

In the ensuing months, creditors have taken control of at least two properties formerly owned by CBZ Management, and city officials are moving forward with an emergency order to shut down a third by mid-February.

Though police officials have continued to reject claims that any apartment complexes were systematically taken over by Tren de Aragua, periodic reports of violent crime at or near the properties in question have continued to stoke fears about its influence, including a brutal incident in December in which a Venezuelan couple were allegedly kidnapped and tortured by members of the gang.

Nine people have been formally charged in that incident, and were placed in federal immigration holds along with seven other suspects taken into custody by Aurora police. Arrest warrants were issued for three other suspects in the incident, and at least six other suspected TdA members had previously been taken into custody and charged with other crimes.

Far-right rhetoric

While campaigning for a second term, Trump attacked undocumented immigrants for their “bad genes” and accused them of “poisoning the blood of our country,” rhetoric that drew widespread comparisons to remarks by Adolf Hitler and other far-right nationalist leaders. His top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, said during last year’s Aurora rally that Trump would create “a country of, by and for Americans, and Americans only.”

Trump has pledged to deploy the National Guard to forcibly deport as many as 25 million people from the U.S., and he has frequently compared the scope of his plans to a 1954 U.S. government operation named after a racial slur for Mexicans living in the United States, which deported an estimated 1.1 million people to Mexico. The crackdown resulted in conditions on trains, trucks and cargo ships that a later congressional investigation likened to “slave ships” and led to the deaths of at least 88 deportees.

“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said at a campaign rally in September. “And we’re going to start with Springfield (Ohio) and Aurora.”

Multiple news outlets, however, have reported that the first large-scale immigration enforcement operation of Trump’s second term would come in Chicago beginning on Tuesday.

Press representatives from the Colorado National Guard did not immediately respond to inquires from Colorado Newsline on Monday. The National Guard Bureau of Public Affairs wrote in an email that it could not comment “on orders that haven’t been received yet nor are we able to speculate on units that may potentially receive orders in the future.”

Asked about the potential for National Guard mobilizations, a spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis said the state is “not currently aware of new enforcement actions.”

“We are closely monitoring for any changes in federal policy,” spokesperson Shelby Wieman said in a text Monday.

“We’re going to depend on our community to organize, to rally together to protect our neighbors in the face of what is to come,” said Marcano. “Because the first time, Trump was malevolent but incompetent. This time he is malevolent and more experienced. So I think that people are going to feel these impacts much faster and much more severely.”

Newsline’s Quentin Young contributed to this report.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

An “unmanageable situation.” A “pretty daunting consequence.” A “troubling potential disuniformity.”

Although the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court differed in the words they chose to describe it, they were largely united in using their questions during oral arguments Thursday to fret over the potential repercussions of upholding the Colorado Supreme Court’s historic decision to bar former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot under a Civil War-era insurrection clause.

The case began last year as a lawsuit filed by six Republican and unaffiliated voters against Trump and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Backed by the liberal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and armed with a legal theory endorsed by a handful of prominent legal scholars, the plaintiffs argued that Trump’s actions in relation to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol disqualify him from office under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Section 3 of the amendment prohibits someone who took an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again.

Though the clause has been invoked in only a small number of cases in the last 150 years, a challenge brought by CREW successfully led to the 2022 removal of a county commissioner in New Mexico who had participated in the events of Jan. 6. Colorado was singled out by CREW as a “good venue” for a challenge against Trump’s candidacy because of provisions in its election code that explicitly bar candidates who are ineligible to assume office from appearing on the ballot.

How a Colorado lawsuit against Trump’s eligibility went from ‘long shot’ to the Supreme Court

A 4-3 majority of the Colorado Supreme Court, writing that it was “cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory,” ruled on Dec. 19 that Trump was ineligible, though it stayed its decision pending a highly anticipated U.S. Supreme Court appeal.

“We are here because, for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation’s Capitol came under violent assault,” Jason Murray, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, told the court during Thursday’s oral arguments. “For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.”

Very little of Thursday’s two-hour hearing, however, was devoted to the specifics of what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021. Justices instead focused at length on two key legal issues raised by Trump in his defense: the question of whether Section 3 can be enforced by a state in the absence of legislation from Congress, as well as a theory holding that the clause’s reference to “officer(s) of the United States” doesn’t include the president.

Griswold, a Democrat and outspoken Trump critic, took no position on Trump’s eligibility during trial proceedings last year, but has since said the Colorado Supreme Court “got it right,” and formally urged the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm the decision.

“We’ll follow the Supreme Court’s decision. What their decision will be, we can’t say at this point,” Griswold said in an interview following the hearing. “I think it would be a dangerous and sad day for the United States if Trump’s arguments were upheld.”

‘Pervasive national interest’

Echoing the views expressed by many commentators and Republican state officials in the weeks since the Colorado decision, members of the court — where Republican-appointed justices hold a 6-3 majority — raised the specter of a series of retaliatory disqualifications and a chaotic patchwork of standards at the state level if the ruling is affirmed.

“If Colorado’s position is upheld, surely there will be disqualification proceedings on the other side, and some of those will succeed,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “I would expect that, you know, a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, you’re off the ballot. And others, for the Republican candidate, you’re off the ballot. It’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election.”

Justice Elena Kagan, a member of the court’s liberal minority, appeared to agree, referring to the court’s previous recognition of a “pervasive national interest in the selection of candidates for national office.”

“It’s a broader principle about who has power over certain things in our federal system,” Kagan said. “There are certain national questions where states are not the repository of authority. … What’s a state doing deciding who other (states’) citizens get to vote for for president?”

Trump himself addressed the ballot case in a brief appearance Thursday morning outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

“It’s unfortunate that we have to go through a thing like that,” Trump said. “I consider it to be more election interference by the Democrats.”

Colorado in the spotlight

Alongside oral arguments by Murray and Trump attorney Jonathan Mitchell, Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson briefly answered questions on Griswold’s behalf during Thursday’s hearing, telling the court that Colorado’s election laws had worked as intended.

The evidentiary record used by the Colorado Supreme Court to determine that Trump had engaged in insurrection — including hundreds of pages of testimony and video footage collected by the select U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — was produced during a five-day trial in Denver District Court beginning Oct. 30.

“Nothing in the Constitution strips the states of their power to direct presidential elections in this way,” Stevenson said. “This case was handled capably and efficiently by the Colorado courts under a process that we have used to decide ballot challenges for more than a century.”

Although the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision thrust the Centennial State into the national spotlight, few prominent Colorado Democrats have eagerly embraced the ruling.

“I think we have to beat Donald Trump, if he’s the Republican nominee, in an election,” Gov. Jared Polis said in response to questions about the case in a Fox Business interview last month.

In a statement Thursday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser did not refer directly to Trump or the insurrection clause but called on the court to “uphold Colorado’s election laws and our state’s right to exclude from the ballot any candidate who is ineligible for the office.”

Norma Anderson, the 91-year-old lead plaintiff in the Colorado case, is a former Republican Colorado House speaker. She was present along with other plaintiffs in the Supreme Court chambers on Thursday, and said afterwards that the justices were “hard to read.”

“I think it’s 50-50,” Anderson said. “They were very inquisitive. I think what they were trying to figure out is, ‘Is this really my job to do?’”

Among the hundreds of people present in the court’s crowded chambers Thursday were Carlos Samour, a Colorado Supreme Court justice who wrote a withering dissent from the majority’s ruling; Gerard Magliocca, a scholar of 19th-century constitutional law who provided expert testimony on Section 3 during the Denver trial; Seth Barrett Tillman, a conservative scholar who helped popularize the theory that the president is not an “officer of the United States”; and Dave Williams, the chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

Williams, a Trump loyalist who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election, said in an interview that he was confident the court would rule in Trump’s favor, regardless of the grounds on which it bases its decision.

“I guess I don’t have a specific way for them to resolve it,” Williams said. “Ultimately my interest is in ensuring people can vote for Donald Trump. However they get there makes no difference to me.”

Griffin’s case

The nation’s highest court has never directly weighed in on the application of Section 3, and the long dormancy of the clause has given the justices little recent case law from which to draw.

Much of the technical legal analysis in Thursday’s oral arguments concerned an 1869 ruling known simply as Griffin’s case, which arose when a Virginia man challenged his criminal conviction on the grounds that the judge who oversaw his trial should have been removed from office under the 14th Amendment, ratified the previous year.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, acting as a lower-court judge while “riding circuit,” sided against the petitioner, ruling that disqualified officeholders weren’t removed “by the direct and immediate effect” of Section 3, but that “legislation by congress is necessary to give effect to the prohibition, by providing for such removal.” A year later, Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870 to do just that, including a so-called quo warranto measure authorizing civil actions to remove disqualified officeholders.

“The holding of Griffin’s case (says) that a state is not allowed to implement or enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment unless and until Congress enacts implementing legislation allowing it to do so,” Mitchell said.

Supporters of Trump’s disqualification say that Griffin’s case was wrongly decided. In an influential 2023 paper on Section 3, conservative legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen called Chase’s opinion “full of sleight of hand, motivated reasoning and self-defeating maneuvers.” The Griffin decision also directly conflicts with a separate circuit-court opinion authored by Chase regarding the treason prosecution of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, in which he reached the opposite conclusion.

“Griffin was not a precedential Supreme Court decision,” noted Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It was a circuit-court decision by a justice who, when he becomes a justice, writes in the Davis case, he assumed that Jefferson Davis would be ineligible to hold any office, particularly the presidency, and treated … Section 3 as executing itself, needing no legislation on the part of Congress to give it effect.”

But many of the justices expressed concerns about the implications of ruling that Section 3 is “self-executing,” allowing states to enforce it without congressional action. Responding to questions from Justice Samuel Alito, Stevenson said the country has “institutions in place” to prevent a tit-for-tat series of legal battles over candidate disqualifications.

“I think we have to have faith in our system, that people will follow their election processes appropriately, that they will take realistic views of what insurrection is under the 14th Amendment,” Stevenson said. “Courts will review those decisions. This court may review some of them. But I don’t think that this court should take those threats too seriously in its resolution of this case.”

“You don’t think that’s a serious threat?” asked Alito. “We should proceed on the assumption that it’s not a serious threat?”

In visible contrast to other justices, Alito, a hardline conservative appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush in 2006, maintained a relaxed posture throughout much of Thursday’s hearing, and could frequently be seen reclined and rocking in his chair during questioning.

At one point, Alito probed Murray with pointed questions about whether Section 3’s disqualification for officeholders who have “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the United States could be used to disqualify a president who acted to “release funds” to “a country that proclaims again and again and again that the United States is its biggest enemy” — a reference to a far-right talking point positing that President Joe Biden could be disqualified for issuing certain economic sanctions waivers in the course of diplomatic negotiations with Iran.

“You’re really not answering my question,” Alito told Murray when he tried to respond. “It’s not helpful if you don’t do that.”

Though Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives shortly after the events of Jan. 6 for “incitement of insurrection,” he was acquitted after leaving office when all but a handful of Republican senators voted against his conviction. Last year, he was indicted by federal prosecutors who allege that his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” about the 2020 election “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government.”

That case is still pending, and Trump’s attorneys have asked courts to dismiss it on the grounds that he is immune from prosecution for actions he took in his official capacity as president. After the U.S. Court of Appeals turned down that argument this week, Trump could soon appeal the presidential immunity claims to the Supreme Court.

Federal statute has lacked a clear civil enforcement mechanism for Section 3 disqualification since the relevant portions of the Enforcement Act of 1870 were repealed in 1948. A criminal penalty exists under a law known as Section 2383, and anyone convicted under that statute faces a prison term of up to 10 years and disqualification from “holding any office under the United States.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three members of the Supreme Court appointed by Trump himself, also appeared to be satisfied with the Griffin’s case precedent during Thursday’s arguments, and said that Congress could enact Section 3 enforcement legislation similar to the criminal penalty under Section 2383 if it wanted.

“Just to be clear, under (Section) 2383, you agree that someone could be prosecuted for insurrection by federal prosecutors and, if convicted, could be or shall be disqualified then from office?” Kavanaugh asked Mitchell.

Mitchell’s answer sent a ripple of murmurs through the crowded court chambers.

“Yes. But the only caveat that I would add is that our client is arguing that he has presidential immunity,” he said. “So we would not concede that he can be prosecuted for what he did on Jan. 6 under (Section) 2383.”

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

More than a dozen attorneys general from Republican-controlled states topped a long list of parties who have filed briefs in a legal challenge to former President Donald Trump’s constitutional eligibility to appear on Colorado’s 2024 ballot.

The Colorado Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case this week, after a Denver District Court judge last month ruled against six voters who argue that Trump’s role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol disqualifies him from office under a Civil War-era insurrection clause.

Although Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump “engaged in insurrection” within the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which prohibits a person who did so after taking an oath to support the Constitution from holding office again — she wrote in her Nov. 17 ruling that the clause does not apply to the presidency.

The case was quickly appealed to the state’s highest court by both sides. The plaintiffs, who are backed by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, say Wallace’s finding that Section 3’s reference to “officer(s) of the United States” does not include the president is “nonsensical.” Trump’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to review a wide range of issues in the case, including the finding that the former president engaged in insurrection.

Ahead of the case being taken up by the Colorado Supreme Court, outside parties have filed amicus or friend-of-the-court briefs in support of either side. Similar efforts to block Trump’s 2024 candidacy have been filed in other states, and the issue is widely expected to ultimately be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A group of 19 Republican-leaning states, led by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, urged the court to follow the example of other states, including Minnesota and Michigan, and reject the plaintiffs’ arguments.

“The 14th Amendment entrusts Insurrection Clause questions to Congress — not state officials or state courts,” the Nov. 29 brief states. “Allowing each state and its courts to determine eligibility using malleable standards would create an unworkable patchwork of eligibility requirements for President.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Rokita called challenges to Trump’s eligibility an “assault on our republic.” A former GOP member of Congress and close Trump ally, Rokita has repeated baseless conspiracy theories alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Such claims have been repeatedly debunked by elections officials, experts, media investigations, law enforcement and the courts.

Trump was indicted in August by federal prosecutors who allege that his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” about the 2020 election “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government.” Since announcing last year he would seek the presidency again in 2024, he has maintained a substantial polling lead over his rivals for the GOP nomination.

A group of 14 state Republican parties, led by the Kansas Republican Party, also filed a brief in support of Trump’s ballot eligibility. Echoing arguments made by the Colorado Republican Party, which has participated alongside Trump throughout the trial as a so-called intervenor, the state parties say that Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold serves only a “ministerial” role in certifying parties’ selected candidates to the ballot and has no authority to bar Trump unilaterally.

Attorneys representing Griswold, however, continued to dispute that claim in filings before the Supreme Court. Though Griswold has taken no official position on whether Trump is ineligible, the secretary of state’s office maintains that she has a clear responsibility under Colorado’s Election Code to ensure only candidates who are eligible to take office are placed on the ballot.

“The Secretary’s overriding concern is that Colorado courts and election officials continue to be empowered to ensure the integrity of the ballot,” the secretary of state’s brief says. “Colorado has not ceded its responsibility to ensure a fair and accurate ballot to political parties.”

The Republican secretaries of state of Ohio, Missouri and Wyoming filed a their own brief arguing Trump was “wrongfully” accused of engaging in an insurrection.

“This is a classic case of judicial overreach, and the (lower court judge’s) ruling in this case has no basis in law,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in a statement. “The district court’s order relies on flimsy and circumstantial evidence to reach a flawed conclusion with far-reaching implications both for the president’s own legal defense and for the broader democratic process of free and fair elections.”

A former Republican Colorado secretary of state, Mary Estill Buchanan, joined advocacy group Colorado Common Cause in an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs’ case, telling the court that “this country and its institutions are at a crossroads.”

“(Trump) allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent. Mr. Trump has sought at every turn to inject chaos into our country’s electoral system in the upcoming 2024 presidential election,” the brief said. “He should be given no opportunity to do so in the state of Colorado.”

The state Supreme Court will hear two hours of oral argument in the case starting at 1 p.m. on Dec. 6.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

The final day of a weeklong trial in a challenge to former President Donald Trump’s constitutional eligibility to seek office again began with a protracted dispute over how much expertise an expert witness called by Trump’s legal team really had.

Robert Delahunty, a retired law professor and legal commentator who acknowledged he’d never before given expert testimony on any subject in court, took the stand Friday morning in a case brought by six Colorado voters who allege that Trump must be barred from the 2024 presidential ballot by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Civil War-era clause prohibits anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office in the United States. Plaintiffs argue Trump “engaged” in insurrection as part of the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump’s attorneys called on Delahunty, they told Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace, as a witness with expertise in “interpreting legal historical documents,” and to rebut testimony earlier in the week from Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca, an expert on 19th-century constitutional history who has written multiple law review articles on Section 3’s application.

Friday’s trial proceedings began with several hours of direct testimony from Delahunty, whose loquacious answers had to be interrupted repeatedly by Wallace and Trump attorney Scott Gessler. Wallace overruled strong objections from plaintiffs’ attorneys to the admission of Delahunty as an expert witness on the subject of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, which Trump’s team justified on the basis of Delahunty’s 16 years of teaching constitutional law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

“Teaching a first-year law school course does not mean that he’s made scholarly contributions” to research on the history and interpretation of Section 3, said Jason Murray, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

“Professor Delahunty has expertise in reviewing historical documents and applying them to constitutional provisions,” Wallace said in denying a motion to exclude the testimony. “His lack of scholarly contribution to Section 3 in particular, I don’t think excludes him from testifying on the opinions that he’s testifying to today.”

In his testimony on Wednesday, Magliocca cited multiple definitions of “engaging in insurrection” that were detailed in legal opinions from the 1860s, including any “overt and voluntary act, done with the intent of aiding or furthering” an insurrection, as well as an act “by speech or by writing (that) incited others to engage in rebellion.”

But Delahunty, while conceding that some of those opinions were “certainly good evidence” for the plaintiffs’ interpretation, said his interpretation of the historical record differed from Magliocca’s.

“I think ‘engage in insurrection’ has a more restricted meaning than he supposes,” Delahunty said.

An ’officer of the United States’?

Under cross-examination by plaintiffs’ attorneys, Delahunty acknowledged that the 14th Amendment had never been the primary focus of his scholarship, and that in preparing his report on the subject for the court, he had not done any original research to consult primary sources from the time period in which the amendment was ratified.

While serving as a lawyer for United States Homeland Security Council in 2002, Delahunty was a co-author with attorney John Yoo of the so-called “torture memos,” legal opinions advising that detainees in the War on Terror were not entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions. He is currently a fellow at the Claremont Institute, which has been described as an “anti-democracy think tank” and a “nerve center for the American right” under Trump.

Among the many prominent Trump allies affiliated with the Claremont Institute is attorney John Eastman, a key architect of the former president’s scheme to block congressional certification of the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. Eastman has been indicted alongside Trump for an alleged conspiracy to overturn the election by prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia.

In addition to disputing the definition of “engaging in insurrection,” Delahunty also appeared to an endorse an argument made by Trump supporters that Section 3’s reference to “officers of the United States” does not include the president.

“What’s your opinion on Professor Magliocca’s conclusion that the phrase ‘officer of the United States,’ as used in Section 3, includes the president and vice president of the United States?” Gessler asked.

“I disagree with that conclusion,” Delahunty answered. “I looked into that question more, and I was persuaded that he was really wrong. I think that term is, in essence, a term of art and had a specialized meaning.”

But under questioning from Murray, Delahunty maintained that he “took no position” on the question, which he called “disputed among scholars.”

Murray pointed to a commentary written by Delahunty for The Federalist, a conservative website, in August. In that article, Delahunty wrote of Section 3: “Although it does not explicitly refer to presidents or presidential candidates, comparison with other constitutional texts referring to ‘officer(s)’ supports the interpretation that it applies to the presidency too.”

“You wrote that article in August of this year, before you were hired by Donald Trump as a paid expert in this case, right?” asked Murray. “Since the time you wrote that article in The Federalist, you’ve been paid about $60,000 by Donald Trump for your work in this case?”

“Yes,” Delahunty replied.

Concluding testimony

Delahunty also questioned whether the clause’s ban on office-holding is, as supporters of the plaintiffs’ case maintain, “self-executing,” meaning that congressional action is not required to bar a candidate from office.

The lack of specific federal legislation implementing Section 3’s provisions, Delahunty said, “should, if only for reasons of prudence … lead a court to abstain from deciding what that phrase means, and toss the ball over to Congress.”

Delahunty’s testimony drew a pointed question from Wallace.

“Do you have examples of situations in which a court has basically said, ‘The Constitution is too hard for me to interpret, therefore I’m going to let Congress tell me what it means?’” she asked. “In general, I think that’s exactly the job of the court, to interpret the Constitution.”

“No, I don’t have case law to cite,” Delahunty said. “It approaches the question of whether Section 3 is self-executing. It goes more to that.”

Other concluding testimony on Friday included the questioning of Tim Heaphy, the former chief investigating counsel for the nine-member House of Representatives select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. The admission of many of that committee’s findings as evidence in the 14th Amendment case has been disputed at length by Trump’s legal team, who allege that the panel was politically motivated and didn’t allow for an “adversarial” process through which evidence could be presented and challenged.

Under questioning, Heaphy defended the committee’s work as “fair and impartial,” repeatedly dismissing Gessler’s implications that it was compromised by the fact that its members, who included seven Democrats and two Republicans, had been highly critical of Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6 and voted to impeach him over “incitement” of the attack a week later.

“It was the hypothesis that began the investigation, in the form of the impeachment proceedings,” Heaphy said. “We tested it, as you always do in an investigation, against other facts as they emerged, and it never changed.”

Following the conclusion of witness testimony, the trial ended shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday. The court will reconvene to hear closing arguments on Nov. 15, with Wallace expected to issue her ruling by Nov. 17.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 5:36 p.m. to include additional details about Friday’s trial proceedings.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.