Former Attorney General Bill Barr, a frequent critic of his onetime boss, Donald Trump, wrote Tuesday he opposes the myriad "unconstitutional" state efforts to keep the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination off their ballots, calling them "foolish" and "destructive."
In a guest column for the media outlet The Free Press, Barr made clear that he is "firmly opposed" to Trump's candidacy, but not this way — blue states using the insurrectionist clause of the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off their primary ballots.
"But I also believe that the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order," Barr wrote. "The Supreme Court needs to act swiftly to strike down these foolish decisions."
Barr, who served under Trump for 22 months, accused Trump of being "off the rails" in a new memoir that came out earlier this year. Barr has also called Trump "nauseating," a "consummate narcissist," and accused him of a "grave wrongdoing" regarding the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
He also called Trump "truculent, petty and toxic" in his column for The Free Press. But Barr condemned the "legal maneuver" by Democrats "as a neat way to stop Trump." And it's not a matter of opinion to Barr, but rather a matter of law.
"As a legal matter, states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection," Barr wrote. "If the Justice Department, in pursuing its criminal case, had found that Trump had engaged in insurrection, it would be another story. But it has not."
Barr slammed the decisions in Colorado and Maine as "half-baked processes."
"I do not want Trump to get the GOP nomination. But he has to be beaten at the ballot box — not by subverting the basic systems of our democracy," Barr wrote. "The effort to use the Fourteenth Amendment to knock Trump off the ballot is much like the left's previous schemes to sidetrack or defeat Trump politically through legal ploys that stretch the law beyond its proper bounds. And like Russiagate; or the civil and criminal cases currently being prosecuted against Trump by New York; or the overbroad prosecution being pursued by the Georgia district attorney; these gambits are rightly seen as unfair.
"Nothing is more destructive of democracy than for one faction to try to win in the political arena by disenfranchising its adversaries. The election of 2024 already will pose the gravest of challenges to our political institutions. Such extrajudicial and unconstitutional measures will only take us down far more dangerous channels."
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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