Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2-ranking member of the Senate GOP leadership, are staying quiet on the state Supreme Court ruling barring former President Trump from the Colorado ballot.
McConnell and Thune have held back from endorsing Trump, despite his commanding lead in the polls, and at various points have suggested that his lack of appeal to suburban swing voters and college-educated women would be a problem in a general election.
Some Republican senators think their party would be better off if Trump were not the GOP nominee in 2024, though polls show he is cruising easily to a third nomination for president.
So while a group of GOP lawmakers is rallying to Trump’s defense and demanding the U.S. Supreme Court immediately overturn the decision in Colorado, McConnell, Thune and other Trump skeptics in the Senate GOP conference are sitting this one out.
At the very least, they’re not eager to put more political pressure on the Supreme Court, which is now facing at least two major Trump-related rulings and will likely become a central player in the 2024 election.
McConnell voted to acquit Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection to stop the transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021, but made it clear he did so on the technical grounds that Trump had already left office by the time the Senate held its trial in February 2021.
The GOP leader blamed Trump for inciting a mob of supporters to overrun Capitol Police to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
He called Trump’s actions preceding the riot “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” he said on the Senate floor.
President Biden echoed that when asked about the Colorado court’s decision Wednesday.
“You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection,” Biden told reporters. “No question about it — none, zero. And he seems to be doubling down on everything.”
Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, called out McConnell and Thune on Wednesday for staying quiet about the Colorado decision. He praised Senate GOP conference Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) for blasting the Colorado Supreme Court as “a liberal, activist court.”
“Barrasso is the only one with the courage to weigh in against what the radical left is trying to do to my father,” Trump Jr. wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, reposting Barrasso’s criticism of the decision.
The Wyoming senator, the third-ranking member of Senate GOP leadership, called it “a blatant, political attempt to silence American voters.”
“SCOTUS will rightly dispose of it in an ash heap,” he said, predicting the U.S. Supreme Court would strike it down.
But some conservative commentators are defending the Colorado decision, notably former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Luttig, who called it an “unassailable” and “straightforward application of the 14th Amendment’s plain terms.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) thought after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill that his Senate Republican colleagues would be more willing to support a resolution to bar Trump from running for office than to convict him on the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection.
“It’s an idea that’s out there that I think people are contemplating in the accountability space,” he said at the time.
In September, Kaine argued again, “There’s a powerful argument to be made” for keeping Trump off the presidential ballot on the basis of the 14th Amendment.
Other Senate Republicans are pushing back hard on the idea.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who has aspirations of becoming Senate GOP leader someday, called the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling “nonsensical” and said it would add to the “preexisting chaos of the 2024 election.”
“The biggest ‘threat to democracy’ is to deny voters their choice. This ruling must be reviewed by the Supreme Court,” he said in a post on X.
National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman Steve Daines (Mont.), who’s endorsed Trump for president, went a step further and donated $5,000 from his leadership PAC to Trump’s legal defense fund in response to the Colorado decision.
He and the NRSC will file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging it to overturn the decision.
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told Fox Business on Wednesday that Democrats are attempting to discredit the Supreme Court because they view the court’s conservative justices as an obstacle to disqualifying Trump from running for office.
“The Democrats have been laying the predicate to contaminate the Supreme Court, to somehow dissuade the American public from trusting the Supreme Court, but they have to do their job,” he said.
Senate Democrats on Wednesday defended the decision to block Trump from the Colorado ballot.
“I think it’s a plain reading of the text of the 14th Amendment,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, on CNN.
“I was here on Jan. 6. We had an impeachment trial for President Trump after the events of Jan. 6. I think it’s undeniable in my view that he participated in an insurrection and as such should be disqualified from federal office.”
The nation adopted Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War to prevent members of the Confederacy who took up arms against the United States from returning to federal elected office.