The Biden administration has enacted or threatened sanctions against foreign nations who have kicked opposition candidates off the ballot, leading some lawmakers to question the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling this week to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 election ballot.
The Biden administration has enacted or threatened sanctions against foreign nations who have kicked opposition candidates off the ballot, leading some lawmakers to question the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling this week to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 election ballot.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision on Tuesday to remove Trump from the state 2024 election ballots, having decided he is disqualified to run for office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban,” despite the former president not being criminally convicted of such an offense. The Biden administration has previously used sanctions in retaliation against foreign nations who engaged in stifling political competition and removing opponents from election ballots, as several lawmakers have pointed out this week.
“The U.S. has put sanctions on other countries for doing exactly what the Colorado Supreme Court has done today,” Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said on Tuesday.
“We’d threaten sanctions against countries that had their courts exclude a challenger to protect the incumbent,” Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee said Tuesday.
Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack.
Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the… https://t.co/yMm4wTb1K8
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) December 20, 2023
Venezuela, a socialist dictatorship in Central America, was sanctioned by the former Trump administration for undemocratic practices, according to The Council on Foreign Relations. The current Biden administration started to lift some of those sanctions in October, only on Venezuela agreeing to certain conditions, including a commitment to holding fair elections in 2024 and allowing dictator Nicolas Maduro’s political opponents to appear on the ballot.
