Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy vowed on Tuesday to pull out from the GOP primary ballot in Colorado if the state's Supreme Court does not let former US President Donald Trump contest in the US Presidential Elections next year.
"I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot," he said on X (formerly Twitter).
Ramaswamy also urged other Republican candidates like Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to withdraw from the Colorado polls immediately if the court doesn't reinstate Trump on the ballot, "or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal manoeuvre which will have disastrous consequences for our country," he said on X.
The top court on December 19 declared Trump ineligible for the US President's office under the Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, due to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
Ramaswamy termed the court's order as "un-American and unconstitutional".
"This is what an actual attack on democracy looks like in an un-American, unconstitutional, and unprecedented decision, a cabal of Democrat judges are barring Trump from the ballot in Colorado."
"Having tried every trick in the book to eliminate President Trump from running in this election, the bipartisan Establishment is now deploying a new tactic to bar him from ever holding office again: the 14th Amendment," his post further read.
The decision of the Colorado top court whose 7 justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.
In a narrow 4-3 decision, Colorado's highest court invoked the 14th Amendment's 'insurrection clause' to kick off the 77-year-old former president due to his involvement in the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, which says officials who take an oath to support the US Constitution are banned from future office if they "engaged in insurrection.
As per CNN, the ruling will be placed on hold until January 4, pending Trump's appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Colorado election officials have said the matter needs to be settled by January 5, which is the statutory deadline to set the list of candidates for the GOP primary scheduled for March 5.
The court concluded that Trump's actions, including spreading false claims of election fraud and directing supporters to the Capitol, amounted to engaging in insurrection, The Hill reported.
The insurrection clause bars the holding of "any office...under the United States" if a person engaged in insurrection after swearing to "support" the Constitution as an "officer of the United States." The Colorado Supreme Court determined that this clause applies to the office of the president, the report added.
The Hill reported that another key GOP presidential candidate, Chris Christie argued that it is voters and not the courts that should decide if Trump should be "prevented" from being re-elected to the White House.
What the top court said:
The majority wrote in its unsigned opinion: "President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President (Mike) Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection."
"We conclude that the foregoing evidence, the great bulk of which was undisputed at trial, established that President Trump engaged in insurrection. President Trump's direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterised as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary," the opinion added, as per CNN.
(With inputs from ANI and AP)