Donald Trump has been excluded from the Maine primary

Maine’s secretary of state has ruled that former President Donald Trump cannot appear on that state’s ballot because he is disqualified under the rebellion clause of the 14th amendment.

Shenna Bellows wrote that Trump “used a false narrative of voter fraud to incite his supporters and send them to the Capitol to prevent the certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.”

Read Maine’s decision.

The decision follows a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump is ineligible to hold office. But Republicans who appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday will continue to appear on the ballot unless Supreme Court justices throw out the case or side with the state court.

The clause in the 14th Amendment requires that those who have taken an oath be disqualified from holding office if they “participated in any insurrection or rebellion against it, or gave aid or comfort to the enemy.”

In her decision, Bellows wrote that she “did not come to this conclusion lightly.” “I am aware that no Secretary of State has denied a presidential candidate access to the ballot pursuant to Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, I also admit that no presidential candidate has ever been involved in an uprising.”

Judges in other states such as Minnesota and Michigan have overturned efforts to keep Trump from the election. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom was skeptical of legal action to prevent the former president from appearing on the ballot. According to the Los Angeles Times, Newsom said in a statement last week: “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and even our democracy, but in California we are defeating candidates at the polls.” Everything else is political distraction.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement: “Maine’s secretary of state is a former ACLU attorney, a virulent leftist and a bipartisan Biden-supporting Democrat who decided to run on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden interfering in the presidential election. We are witnessing in real time the attempted theft of the election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter. Democrats in blue states are recklessly and unconstitutionally suspending the civil rights of American voters by trying to impeach President Summarily removing Trump’s name from the ballot.”