Stephen Colbert
Late-night hosts celebrated the news that Colorado’s supreme court disqualified Donald Trump from the ballot in the state, citing a little-known clause in the 14th amendment. “You go, Colorado,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “Just goes to show you can make good decisions when you’re high. I’ve got the munchies for justice.
“Can you imagine how mad Donald Trump must have been when he heard that news?” he wondered. “Oh, to have been a ketchup stain on his wall.”
The Colorado judges invoked the 14th amendment’s insurrection clause, which states that no one can hold an office in the US if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.
“Now the insurrection in this case was January 6,” Colbert explained, “and aid or comfort to our enemies is his side hustle.
“This ruling is unprecedented,” said Colbert, but the Colorado justices reached it with, as they wrote, “little difficulty”.
“It’s sort of a gimme,” said Colbert. “Trump denied the results of the electoral college, summoned a huge group to Washington and told them to march to the Capitol to stop the count. Everyone knows what he did. It would be like Martin Luther King saying ‘I didn’t have a dream, you had a dream. Must’ve been something you ate.’”
Nevertheless, several conservative pundits took the airwaves to blast the decision as “anti-democratic”.
“Counterpoint: removing the guy who tried to overthrow a democratic election is actually pro-democratic,” Colbert responded. “That’s like saying it’s anti-hen to keep the fox out of the henhouse. Let the chickens decide whether he finds them delicious.”
To be clear, he concluded, the Colorado supreme court did not kick Trump off the ballot. “The United States constitution kicked Trump off the ballot.
“The 14th amendment says if you try to destroy our democracy, you can’t come back and try again,” he said. “It’s the same reason I’m not letting my appendix back into my abdomen, no matter how well it polls in Iowa.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers also dug into the Colorado judges’ decision. “Now I know I’m really stretching the imagination here, but let’s just think for a second,” he said. “An unrepentant insurrectionist who tried to overthrow democracy lost and is trying to weasel his way back into power like nothing happened. Does that sound like anyone we know?
“The only way this amendment could apply any more directly to Donald Trump,” he continued, “is if it said ‘no person shall hold any office who, having previously taken an oath to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, including any flamboyant land-owning weirdos whose ties are too long and won’t stop complaining about toilets that don’t flush and windmills killing birds.’
“I don’t think that anyone can reasonably dispute the fact that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist, as defined by the plain text of the amendment,” he added.
Meyers quoted the award-winning civil war historian Eric Foner, who said Trump “took an oath to support the constitution and now he has given aid to insurrection and that is the kind of thing the people who wrote the 14th amendment were trying to avoid … even though it has only been used a handful of times in American history, it’s there”.
“Exactly,” Meyers agreed. “This section of the 14th amendment is the kind of thing you rarely use but it’s there in case you need it, like a fire extinguisher or Paramount+.”
