As the StarTribune is reporting this afternoon, a bipartisan group of voters have filed a petition in the Minnesota Supreme Court seeking an order holding that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on Minnesota ballots in the 2024 presidential election (specifically, Minnesota’s presidential primary on Super Tuesday, March 5) because he is disqualified by Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
You can read my much longer diary from last week for more background about the general legal (and especially procedural) issues, but I believe today’s Minnesota filing is the second major lawsuit seeking to have Trump ruled disqualified under Section Three, and the first such action to have been filed directly in a state’s highest court. (As I noted in the previous diary, Colorado voters filed a similar action in district court in Denver last week.)
Today’s petition follows the normal process for court petitions seeking to disqualify a candidate for office from Minnesota ballots on the basis that the candidate is ineligible to run for the office in question.
The court will now seek preliminary filings—likely including a response from the Trump campaign, which is not currently a party to the case but is all but certain to jump in as an “intervenor-respondent”—from the parties. Presuming the petition is not thrown out on immediate jurisdictional or justiciability grounds (a request from one or more Republican entities to dismiss the petition for lack of ripeness seems all but certain), the court will then need to determine whether it can rule on the claims in the petition as straightforward questions of law—or whether, instead, there are disputed matters of material fact that need to be resolved first. If the court determines that fact-finding is necessary, longstanding Minnesota practice in eligibility cases like this one would lead it to appoint a lower-court judge as a “special master” to hold an evidentiary hearing at which the petitioners and the Republican intervenor-respondents would have an opportunity to enter evidence of Trump’s actions into the court record.
Either way, with or without an evidentiary hearing before a special master, the legal issue of disqualification would come to the state supreme court for a final decision.
(The above outline of the procedures ahead in Minnesota illustrate the point that I made in last week’s diary, to various folks’ consternation: there is no guarantee that a trial will take place on this Minnesota court petition. In part this is a straightforward matter of legal nomenclature: nothing that has any real chance of taking place within the adjudication of this petition constitutes a trial as a matter of Minnesota legal parlance. A special-master proceeding is arguably a trial by another name—it is an evidentiary hearing at which opposing sides can and will call witnesses and put documentary evidence into the record—but in petitions like this one, the state supreme court only appoints a special master if it decides that there are disputed issues of material fact that require resolution by a judge. It’s possible, though perhaps a bit unlikely, that the high court will decide that all of the relevant facts in this case are uncontested, and therefore that no evidentiary hearing is necessary to resolve the legal questions presented in the petition.)
For anyone who’s interested in such things, the Minnesota high court currently has five justices appointed by Democratic governors and two who were appointed by former Republican governor Tim Pawlenty. One of the Pawlenty appointees, however, Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea, has announced her retirement effective October 1—so it seems very likely that the court will have a 6-1 majority of justices appointed by Democrats once today’s petition comes up for a decision. And for whatever it’s worth, that final Pawlenty appointee, Justice G. Barry Anderson, is a respected former election attorney who leans conservative on many issues but is not believed to be a fan of TFG. It certainly appears to me that both petitioners and the Trump campaign will get a fair shake on the legal issues in this case from all seven Minnesota justices.
Finally, as everyone and his uncle (including me—hey, I am an uncle) has noted, it is all but inevitable that the U.S. Supreme Court will resolve the issue of Trump’s qualifications under Section Three at some point in the next fourteen months. If that happens soon enough, it could choke off this Minnesota proceeding—and the Colorado one, and all the other proceedings that are sure to be filed in states around the country. Until that happens, however, the cases will continue to be filed, and they’ll continue to grind on.