An effort is brewing to bar former President Donald Trump from being on the Wisconsin presidential ballot next year. But whether it will go flat remains unclear.
Kirk Bangstad is a Democratic activist and owner of a brewpub in Northern Wisconsin. He told reporters in Madison Thursday that he believes Trump's actions at the time of the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol disqualify the former president from holding office again.
"The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution says if you swore to take an oath for office and you were part of an insurrection, not committed a crime of insurrection, but simply were part of an insurrection, and you swore an oath as any officer of the United States---officer meaning military officer, or chief officer of the military, which would be the president, then you are not allowed to run for federal office again. It's very clear. The Fourteenth Amendment is very clear," Bangstad contends.
Bangstad was in Madison to file a petition with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeking to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot across the state. About two hours later, the Commission sent a statement to the news media saying the Commission did not consider the complaint because it involved the commissioner's official capacities and warranted an ethical recusal by the panel and because a different state panel decides who gets on the presidential ballot.
At the earlier news conference, Bangstad said he anticipated the commissioners would fail to ban Trump but said he had to go to the Commission first in order to follow instructions from Milwaukee Federal Judge Lynn Adelman in an earlier case.
Bangstad says he now plans to go to circuit court in Dane County as early as next week.
And if the Trump ballot case would eventually wind up before the State Supreme Court, he'd be okay with that. "We now have four Supreme Court justices who are fair. Many of you would call them progressive, and they changed the balance of the court. I call them fair because they are not in the pockets of Donald Trump," Bangstad says.
The Wisconsin GOP calls Bangstad's effort a "brazenly unconstitutional attempt to interfere in the next election" and that "voters should decide our next president."
But later Thursday, Maine's top election official said she wants to remove Trump from that state's ballot, as Colorado may also do. The GOP is already asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt any ballot blocking.
