Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency.
Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause.
Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, a hard right conservative, was a vocal proponent of Trump’s big lie that his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden was fraudulent, should stand down ahead of the supreme court hearing the case, Raskin argued. Trump’s legal challenges could begin as early as Tuesday.
Raskin led the push for Trump’s second impeachment following the deadly January 6 riot that the ex-president’s supporters staged at the US Capitol.
“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union.
“He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”
Raskin also cautioned that Trump, the runaway favorite in the Republican primary, would inevitably try to overturn the 2024 election if he were to lose again.
“If he’s allowed to stay on the ballot, despite his clear incitement of an insurrection and attempt to overturn the results in the 2020 election, and if he loses to Joe Biden as he almost certainly would … he will feel himself a martyr and he will try to overturn the election result again,” said Raskin, who also served on the special House committee which investigated the January 6 attack.
“So I don’t think we can run scared from Donald Trump. We’ve got to enforce our constitution.”
Allies of Trump, and almost all of his primary challengers, have argued that the separate decisions in Maine and Colorado to disbar him were politically motivated. On Thursday, in an interview on Fox News, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis said the action in Maine “opens Pandora’s box”.
Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has accused Trump of “intolerance towards everyone”, was critical of the decision. “It makes him a martyr,” he told CNN last week. “He’s very good at playing, ‘poor me, poor me’, he’s very good at complaining. But stuff like this should be decided by the voters of the US, it should not be decided by the courts.”
New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, was another jumping to Trump’s defense on Sunday, telling State of the Union that he believed the insurrection argument used by Maine’s secretary of state Shenna Bellows and Colorado’s supreme court to remove the former president were bogus.
“If there was any validity about keeping Trump off the ballot, you’d see 48 other states trying to do the same thing,” said Sununu, who has endorsed Haley for the Republican nomination.
“I think it is very politically motivated by the Maine secretary of state, Trump should be on the ballot [and] everybody just hopes that the supreme court gets involved and overturns what Maine and Colorado are trying to do.”
Sununu also claimed, boldly, that Haley will defeat Trump in New Hampshire’s 23 January primary. An opinion poll just before Christmas placed the former South Carolina governor just four points behind Trump in the state.
“Chris Christie isn’t going to make up 30 points in the next three weeks. Nikki Haley can make up five or 10 points and give Trump that defeat that no one thought was possible, and I think that’s very likely to happen,” he said.
He did, however, concede that Haley’s failure to identify slavery as a cause of the civil war, which forced her into some furious back-pedaling in recent days, was a mistake.
“If you have to clarify an answer, you know, ‘Gee, I guess I should have answered that differently, let’s go clear it up’, so yeah, sure” it was a mistake, he said.
