Fox’s Jonathan Turley Blasts Colorado’s ‘Strikingly Anti-Democratic,’ ‘Chilling’ Decision to Kick Trump Off the Ballot
Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley railed against the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to kick former President Donald Trump off the ballot on The Ingraham Angle Tuesday night, characterizing it as “strikingly anti-democratic” and even “chilling.”
On Monday night, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not compete in the state’s general election next November because he was disqualified under the 14th Amendment. On Fox, Turley strenuously objected to the reasoning behind the decision and issued a warning about its consequences.
“It is a strikingly anti-democratic holding, in my view,” Turley told host Laura Ingraham. “The court literally faced a series of interpretive barriers to get to where it ended up. It adopted the most sweeping, broadest possible interpretation to get over every one of those hurdles. So throughout this opinion, it had to adopt interpretations that could encompass a wide array of statements.”
“They used what’s called true threat precedent to show that you can view what Trump said as encouraging an insurrection by looking at stuff that he said at other times. And that, of course, allowed them to reach this conclusion. In my view, the court is dead wrong,” he continued before noting that similar theories were rejected by other liberal jurists. “I think the opinion is really chilling, and I think that the Supreme Court will make fast work of this theory; I hope it does.”
“And there have been other rulings in other state supreme courts, correct? Or federal courts, that have come to the opposite conclusion here. So this is an outlier, which, again, because of what’s at stake, it’s going to have to be expedited to the court, the Supreme Court,” replied Ingraham.
“Yeah, when you read this opinion, the one thing that keeps on recurring in your mind is: ‘Where is the limiting principle here?'” submitted Turley. “What would not satisfy this test? At each one of these barriers, the court could have adopted a fairly moderate or more narrow approach. But it didn’t. And so on every one of these issues, it really took out all the fail-safes and went to the broadest possible meaning.”
“Well that means that states could engage in a tit-for-tat type of series of decisions. You know, you could have red states blocking Biden on some ballots and blue states blocking Trump,” he added. “And the way this is viewed by the public is really quite horrific. You know, they view President Biden on the ropes, and the ref just called the match.”
Watch above via Fox News.
