Racicot among former GOP governors wanting Trump off Colorado ballot

This story is excerpted from Capitolized, a weekly newsletter featuring expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Want to see Capitolized in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here. 

“Should Mr. Trump be permitted to stand again for election to the presidency, despite his past actions, neither Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment nor the oaths that undergird the bedrock premise that public officials serve to advance the welfare of the people and our common national project will ever be the same. They will have been rendered meaningless in their legal force and stripped of their moral authority and power.”

—Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, a Republican who has since emerged as a vocal critic of his party, writing with two other former GOP governors from decades past in an amicus brief arguing to keep former President Donald Trump off Colorado ballots this year. 

In December, the Colorado Supreme Court disqualified Trump from the presidential ballot in that state, ruling that the former president’s role in inciting the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which says, in part, that people who “engaged in insurrection” cannot hold federal office. 

The case quickly went to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

In that venue, other Montana Republicans have filed or signed on to briefs in Trump’s defense, including U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen.

“The right of all citizens to participate in free and fair elections and to vote for the candidate of their choice is the Constitution’s bedrock guarantee of American democracy,” the NRSC brief reads. “The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring President Trump from the Republican Party’s primary election ballot breaches that guarantee and, if left standing, threatens to thwart the democratic process and the will of the American people in 2024 and beyond.”

Racicot, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, was already very much on the outs with the Montana GOP. Last February, party officials voted for a resolution formally rebuking the man who was once the state’s top Republican. 

“It really is a nonpartisan question,” Racicot told Capitolized Thursday, noting that Democrats have already weighed in on the issue and saying it’s  important for Republicans to do the same. “As a consequence, if we want to be engaged in providing some leadership on the discussion, we as a matter of conscience have the belief that it’s an incredibly serious matter. If you abrogate the Constitution one day, it starts to fall apart the next.”