New Hampshire’s Republican governor and the leader of the state GOP on Wednesday pushed back on the idea that the state would bar former President Donald Trump from appearing on its primary ballot.
A spokesman for Gov. Chris Sununu, a sometime Trump critic, told Fox News that Sununu was not involved in the effort to deny Trump from being on the ballot and predicted that would fail.
“The governor first heard about this effort over the weekend. The governor is not making any attempt or assisting any effort to keep anyone off the ballot. He has not spoken to and has nothing to do with” attempts to keep Trump off the ballot,” Sununu spokesman Ben Vihstadt told Fox News.
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If Trump “follows the same rules as all other candidates,” he added, “the governor doesn’t expect ballot access will be a problem for the former president.”
According to Newsmax, Chris Ager, head of the state Republican Party, said he had discussed Trump’s situation with Secretary of State Dave Scanlan and was “confident that all the current people listed as presidential candidates, … should they apply, would be on our ballot.”
As the Tampa Free Press reported Sunday, Scanlan, who will oversee the nation’s first presidential primary early next year, was considering the left-wing argument that the 14th Amendment precludes Trump from serving again.
Except in this case, Scanlan was listening to a New Hampshire lawyer, Republican Bryant “Corky” Messner, whom Trump had endorsed in the state’s 2020 U.S. Senate race.
Messner said he was arguing for denying Trump a spot to protect the Constitution.
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Messner and other critics claim that because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Trump should be excluded under the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause, which was aimed at former Confederates after the Civil War.
The law bans from public office anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”
Yet in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill that removed all the disqualification provisions applied to most former Confederates. Grant also directed federal prosecutors to drop charges against former Confederates and pardoned almost all former rebels.
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