'On The Verge Of Becoming The New Venezuela': Newt Gingrich SLAMS Court Decision To Remove Trump From Ballot

On Wednesday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich reacted to the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to remove leading Republican presidential candidate and 45th President Donald Trump from the 2024 primary ballot in the state. Gingrich compared the court's ruling to the authoritarian governments of Latin America like Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua.

"Colorado is on the verge of becoming the new Venezuela. Four lawyers have decided that their views outweigh the 1,364,607 Coloradans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020," Gingrich began. "Keeping a political opponent from even running is the behavior of a dictatorship not a democracy. Coloradans should demand these four partisan destroyers of democracy be removed from office. There were 341,000 Colorado voters for Trump for each self appointed freedom killer. They should not be allowed to pretend they are judges. They replace the rule of law with the rule of power. Welcome to Venezuela or Cuba or Nicaragua."

While Gingrich slammed the left-wing jurists for issuing the anti-democratic ruling, an actual Latin American leader also spoke out against the decision. "The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about "democracy,'" wrote El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, who recently cleaned up his country from mass cartel violence and corruption, said about the ruling. 

The Colorado Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, ruled that President Trump could not appear on the primary ballot in the state given that they determined that he attempted an "insurrection" against the United States via the comments he made prior to the January 6 Capitol Riot.

"President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection," the state supreme court's opinion reads. "Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President (Mike) Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection."

"We conclude that the foregoing evidence, the great bulk of which was undisputed at trial, established that President Trump engaged in insurrection," the opinion continued. "President Trump's direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary."

Many legal scholars have come out against the ruling, including former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said, "It's a scandal. It's a shame. The justices who wrote this decision ought to be ashamed of themselves. It's a purely partisan ploy. And the Supreme Court ought to take this up as soon as possible and get us back to the business of electing presidents based on what the people want, not what partisans want and what they can get partisan judges to enact, which clearly violates the explicit terms of the Constitution itself."

"Look, the 14th Amendment was intended to prevent people who engage in the Civil War from running, that's what the purpose was," Dershowitz continued. "If you look at the whole amendment, it talks about the Civil War, it talks about slavery. It's clearly in context, a one-off. It wasn't designed to replace the impeachment provisions of the Constitution, as this court absurdly ruled."

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