AUGUSTA, Maine (LifeSiteNews) — Maine has become the next state to disqualify former U.S. President Donald Trump from its 2024 presidential primary ballots after the Colorado Supreme Court last month moved to disqualify Trump due to his alleged involvement in an “insurrection.” The Colorado Republican Party has appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Colorado’s highest court ruled in a 4-3 decision on December 19 that Trump was ineligible to run for president in 2024 due to his actions surrounding the so-called “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and that his name should not appear on state ballots in the primaries. 

Despite the claims that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” however, the U.S. Senate has acquitted Trump of the charge and no federal court has convicted him on such charges.

However, on Thursday Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who formerly headed up the Maine chapter of the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), made the decision to withdraw Trump’s name from the 2024 primary ballot, citing the Colorado court’s ruling.

In her 34-page decision, Bellows argued that “Trump’s primary petition is invalid… because he is not qualified to hold the office of the President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a post-Civil War provision that bars from higher office anyone who swore an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion … or given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the nation. 

The decision is not set to take effect “until the Superior Court rules on any appeal” or no appeals are filed within the allotted time frame. 

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued this decision regarding three challenges brought by Maine voters to the nomination petitions of Donald J. Trump for the Republican primary for the President of the United States. Read the decision here: https://t.co/dCwJsC6HN9

— MaineSOS (@MESecOfState) December 28, 2023

“My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” Bellows told the Associated Press shortly after handing down the decision.

In later remarks to NPR, she again argued that “politics and my personal views played no role” in her move to drop Trump’s name from the ballot. 

“I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and that is what I did,” she said.

The Trump campaign had previously called for Bellows to disqualify herself from making any decision on the matter due to her prior public assertion that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was an “insurrection,” but Bellows refused, the AP reported. 

On Thursday, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung blasted the move to pull Trump from the Maine ballots as part of “the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”

Cheung pointed out that state courts in Michigan and Minnesota, as well as federal courts in Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and West Virginia, and “ten other federal jurisdictions,” have already “rejected these bad-faith, bogus 14th Amendment ballot challenges.”

California has also declined to drop Trump’s name from its primary ballots despite a request by its lieutenant governor to explore doing so.

“We know both the Constitution and the American people are on our side in this fight,” the Trump spokesman said. “We will quickly file a legal objection in state court to prevent this atrocious decision in Maine from taking effect, and President Trump will never stop fighting to Make America Great Again.”

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The AP noted that Bellows has become the “first election official to take action unilaterally” to block voters from selecting Trump as their nominee following the Colorado Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision last month, a reality that Bellows herself acknowledged.

The state official wrote in her decision that she didn’t “reach this conclusion lightly” and was conscious “that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

“I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection,” she wrote.

In her interview with NPR, Bellows responded to criticism that Trump has not been found guilty of engaging in insurrection by arguing that the constitutional amendment in question doesn’t state that the person seeking higher office must have been “convicted or impeached.”

Bellows’ reading of the amendment comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on what the Fourteenth Amendment does and does not mean in practice, something it has not yet done.

Legal experts have blasted the Colorado Court’s decision as anti-democratic, and the Colorado GOP late last month appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Trump campaign has also vowed to petition the nation’s highest court on the matter.

Analysts widely expect the Supreme Court to take up the case, which will have an enormous impact on the future of the 2024 presidential contest.

Even the typically left-wing Washington Post has suggested that the court may want to reverse the Colorado high court’s decision.

READ: Washington Post appears to disagree with Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off ballot

“Not only has Mr. Trump not been convicted of insurrection either by a jury of his peers or from the bench by a judge; he hasn’t even been charged with it,” The Washington Post editorial board wrote last month.

The board added that the Biden DOJ, while pursuing other charges, hasn’t argued that Trump was responsible for “violating the federal law against insurrection.” They also pointed out that the issue concerning Trump’s alleged “insurrection” involvement is “unclear’ at best, and that, “[i]n the absence of clarity, a body of unelected officials should be reluctant to prevent the country’s citizens from choosing an elected official to lead them.”

“The Supreme Court, hopefully, understands that,” the Post’s editorial board wrote.