The left’s insatiable — and arguably quixotic — quest to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot is a team effort to be sure. But two well-funded leftist groups in particular are leading the charge in the campaign to take Trump down with a bogus reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the lawfare arm of political strategist David Brock’s network of Democrat-aligned organizations, has dominated national headlines with its Colorado lawsuit — the only “successful” challenge to Trump’s primary ballot status to date.
The banal-sounding Free Speech for People laid the groundwork for the constitutionally suspect challenges after Trump left office in 2021. The nonprofit has thrown its weight behind a so-called “Section 3” effort, browbeating election offices nationwide to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot on the spurious grounds that the 45th president promoted an insurrection to overturn the 2020 election. They insist he incited the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“What we’re seeing in Colorado, Maine, even in Wisconsin … is a complete abuse of the Constitution. This is not at all what it was designed to do, the insurrection clause, that they cite,” said Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, operator of nonprofit and leftist activist tracker Influence Watch. “They are using bogus legal theories to try and keep one of the leading presidential candidates off the ballot, and they’re doing it entirely with left-wing dark money.”
Thayer is not
