The Effort to Keep Trump Off the Ballot Has Been a Century in the Making
28th December 2023
What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.
Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.
That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes. That effort might be called the progressives’ “long march through the Constitution.” The Colorado decision was the bitter fruit of that march. It will almost certainly be slapped down, harshly and quickly, by the US Supreme Court.
The long march began in earnest over a century ago with Woodrow Wilson, more as a scholar than as a president. It became dominant among jurists with the rise of “legal realism” in the 1940s.