Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to “withdraw” from the GOP Primary ballot in Colorado after the state ruled that former President Donald Trump could be removed.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision on Tuesday that Trump would be “disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the justices wrote in a 213-page opinion.
Due to Trump being disqualified, the justices argued “it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State” to allow him to be listed as a candidate on the ballot for president.
This enticed Ramaswamy to take action.
“I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley do the same immediately,” Ramaswamy wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country.”
I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous… pic.twitter.com/qbpNf9L3ln
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 20, 2023
The ruling from the justices overturned a previous decision from Judge Sarah Wallace who ruled in November that Trump was not an “officer of the United States” who is disqualified from holding office and that he should be allowed to appear on the ballot.
In her ruling, Wallace, however, did find that Trump had “engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021, through incitement.”
In his video on X, Ramaswamy revealed that Section Three of the 14th Amendment was a “provision” that was “designed to bar Confederate members, people who switched to the Confederacy, from actually being able to serve.”
“That’s very different than what’s at issue here, to say the least,” Ramaswamy continued. “This is a hollowed-out husk of what the country was built on. The basic principle that ‘We the People’ select our leadership, not the unelected, elite class in the back of palace halls, that’s old world Europe, not the United States.”
The ruling from the Supreme Court of Colorado was placed on hold until Jan. 4 in order to provide Trump time to pursue an appeal from the Supreme Court, according to CNN. Election officials said the matter of whether or not Trump will be taken off the ballot will need to be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for when candidates appearing on the GOP primary ballot must be set.
There are more than three million active and registered voters in the state of Colorado, according to data from the Colorado Secretary of State website. Out of this number, 901,219 are registered as Republicans and 1,019,320 are registered as Democrats.
