GOP Senate group submits letter in support of Trump’s ballot appeal in Colorado
The Republican Senate’s main campaign group filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday in support of Donald J. Trump’s appeal of a ruling in Colorado that blocked him from running for president in the state. It’s the latest sign of the galvanizing effect the former president’s legal troubles are having on his party.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee argued in its amicus brief that the Colorado Supreme Court overstepped its jurisdiction with a decision that threatened to “unleash electoral chaos” in the 2024 presidential race.
“So even if the Colorado Supreme Court were correct that President Trump cannot take office on Inauguration Day, that court has no basis for finding that he cannot run for office,” the committee said in its filings.
The filing from the group, the official party arm that monitors Senate races, underscores how Republicans — like the Trump campaign — are trying to turn the former president’s troubles in court into political assets. With the Iowa caucuses, the first presidential primary contest, less than two weeks away, Trump is trying to hold off challenges from former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Primary polls show that Republican voters, who were largely skeptical of a third Trump presidential campaign, rallied around him over the past year as he was charged with 91 crimes, mostly related to his efforts to cling to power after he lost the election. Elections 2020.
Mr. Trump secured the support of Republican House leadership — from Representative Steve Scalise, the majority leader, on Tuesday, and from Representative Tom Emmer, the majority whip, on Wednesday.
Senator Steve Daines, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is the only member of the Senate Republican leadership who has endorsed Mr. Trump. But the former president received a notable endorsement this week from Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Oklahoma.
The committee’s amicus brief was filed by a high-profile group of attorneys, several of whom worked in the Trump administration. That list includes Noel Francisco, the former solicitor general; John Gore, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Hashim Mooppan, a former Justice Department attorney who defended the ex-president’s travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries.