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Former Colorado Rep. Norma Anderson is the unlikely face of a lawsuit against the Trump campaign that will be heard in the Supreme Court on Thursday.
© Melina Mara/The Washington Post
Can Donald Trump be on the ballot in Colorado?
The US Supreme Court will decide on this.
A Republican is fighting against Trump.
LAKEWOOD, Colo. — Norma Anderson left the Colorado Legislature nearly two decades ago, but she still keeps a copy of the state's laws in her home office.
She carries a pocket constitution in her handbag.
She leaves another, slightly larger copy with pictures of the Founding Fathers on the cover on a table in her living room so she can read it while watching TV.
In this copy, she has turned a page corner to mark the location of the 14th Amendment.
She has read it several times since joining a lawsuit last year invoking the amendment to block Donald Trump from running for president.
Anderson, 91, is the unlikely face of a lawsuit against Trump's campaign that will be heard in the Supreme Court on Thursday.
She was a driving force in Colorado politics for decades and was the first female majority leader in both chambers of the Legislature.
She is a Republican but has long been skeptical of Trump, considering him a rioter who crossed a prohibited line on January 6, 2021 that should prohibit him from holding office again.
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“He tried to overturn an election,” she said.
“The first time I ran, I didn’t win.
I didn't go out and try to change the choice.
I said, 'Oops, try harder next time, lady.'"
Primary election without Trump?
Former president appeals to the Supreme Court
The 2024 election could hinge on whether the Supreme Court agrees with Anderson and five other Republican and independent voters who persuaded the Colorado Supreme Court to bar Trump from running.
The court is expected to quickly rule on the historic Trump v. Anderson case, with the decision likely to apply to all 50 states.
A scrapbook page highlights moments from Norma Anderson's career.
© Melina Mara/The Washington Post
Although a decision in Anderson's favor is considered hopeless, it would shake up American politics by preventing the GOP front-runner from continuing his campaign.
Whatever the court decides, it is likely to anger a large portion of the highly polarized electorate.
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The case relies on the 14th Amendment, which was passed three years after the end of the Civil War to guarantee rights to the formerly enslaved and prevent former Confederates from returning to power.
The latter provision, known as Section 3, states that persons who engage in insurrection after taking an oath to the Constitution may not hold office.
Anderson's lawsuit, filed with the help of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), argues that Trump cannot appear on the ballot for Colorado's March 5 primary because of his actions before and during the attack was involved in an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
The Colorado Supreme Court agreed in a 4-3 ruling in December, and Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.
Section 3 was dormant for more than a century but received new attention after January 6th.
CREW led a lawsuit in 2022 that ousted a county commissioner in New Mexico for his role in the attack on the Capitol.
The debates over whether Section 3 can keep Trump from office before the US election have not always followed clear ideological lines.
Some prominent conservative scholars believe Trump should be unelectable, while some liberals argue that the best way to strengthen democracy is to defeat Trump at the ballot box.
Should Trump be disqualified in the primaries?
USA is divided
Polls show the country is divided on whether Trump should be disqualified.
The former president has called attempts in Colorado and other states to remove him from the ballot an anti-democratic attempt to interfere in the election.
Before contacting Norma Anderson to join the lawsuit seeking to disqualify Trump from the election, attorney Mario Nicolais asked Pam Anderson, the 2022 Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state. She decided against it , but suggested Nicolais try her mother-in-law.
Nicolais, who served as an analyst for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign and now works for CREW, was thrilled to learn that a Republican luminary might consider coming forward and called Norma Anderson.
She immediately agreed.
"The short answer was 'yes,'" Nicolais said.
"And the long answer was, 'Hell, yes'."
Other signatories to the lawsuit included a former Republican congressman from Rhode Island who now lives in Colorado, a teacher, a former deputy chief of staff to a Republican governor, a former executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Larimer County and a conservative columnist for the
Denver Post
.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called CREW a Democratic "front organization" that uses plaintiffs who are RINOs - Republicans in name only - to gain political cover.
In a written statement, he noted that legal efforts to bar Trump from primaries in other states had failed.
“We believe a fair decision by the U.S. Supreme Court will keep President Trump on the ballot and allow the American people to re-elect him to the White House,” Cheung said.
Old-school Republican fights against Trump
Anderson, who was raised a Republican, said she was drawn to the party's belief in fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and a strong national defense.
She hosted a reception for Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona years before he became the Republican presidential nominee in 1964.
As a member of the party committee, she oversaw Republican caucus meetings.
And she knocked on doors to support GOP candidates long before she launched a campaign herself.
She won a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives in 1986, four years after losing her first bid.
Her status as the first female majority leader means less to her, she said in an interview at her home in suburban Denver, than what she sees as her legislative achievements - the creation of the Colorado Department of Transportation, the redesign of the state's school funding system and the implementation a nursing program.
During her tenure in the Legislature, Anderson was seen as a conservative who could work with others but get her own way, said Dick Wadhams, a political consultant and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.
“Once she decided on something, she stuck with it,” he said.
“She didn’t hesitate.
And I think that's one of the reasons she was so popular with Republicans at the time, because she was strong.
Nobody pushed Norma around.”
Mike Beasley, who worked with Anderson when he was chief lobbyist for Gov. Bill Owens (R), said he "saw her bring the biggest tyrants in politics into her office and lock the door and say, 'This is how it's going to be.' , guys.
We'll manage it.
We will find a solution.'
And in nine out of ten cases she got her way 100 percent.”
Anderson surprised her colleagues when she abruptly resigned from the Senate in 2006, a year before her term expired.
She remained active in politics, but began to have reservations about a party that she felt focused too much on people's private lives.
When Trump was the party's presidential nominee in 2016 and 2020, it voted for third-party candidates.
She left the Republican Party in 2018 because of Trump, but rejoined it in 2021.
“I thought, you know, I’m the Republican.
They’re not,” she said.
She said her Republican friends supported her decision to join the lawsuit.
“There are other Republicans who think I’m a RINO,” Anderson said.
"I do not mind."
Colorado Supreme Court justices faced a wave of threats after their decision, as did Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) after she ruled that Trump should not be allowed to vote in her state.
(Bellows' decision was stayed by a state court until the Supreme Court rules on the Colorado case).
Anderson said she knew she would face harassment when she signed up for the lawsuit, but was undeterred.
“I’m not easily intimidated,” she said.
Krista Kafer, a Denver Post columnist who is also a plaintiff, researched the case, prayed about it and consulted with her mother before deciding to join the lawsuit.
She said she did so in part because she wants Democrats to do the same when a leader of their party does what Trump did after an election loss.
And if Trump is not barred from running, she said, future presidents could incite violence if they lose re-election.
"Only this time it won't be a guy with Viking horns and a bunch of people with sticks and makeshift weapons," she said.
“If this becomes the new normal, what will the next normal look like?
Bigger crowds, better weapons.”
Republican is convinced that the lawsuit against Trump is worth it
Friends have supported her, but some acquaintances have cut off contact with her because of the lawsuit, she says.
A neighbor told her she was worried she was going to hell.
Others have called her a Nazi, communist, satanist and RINO on social media.
Kafer left the Republican Party when Trump was nominated in 2016 and voted for a third-party candidate this year.
In 2020, she said, she reluctantly voted for Trump because she thought he was better than Joe Biden.
She said she was appalled when Trump refused to concede and relentlessly repeated lies about the election that fueled the attack on the Capitol.
What brought them back to the Republican Party during Trump's term was, among other things, the appointment of conservative members to the judiciary.
She said she felt Democrats treated Brett M. Kavanaugh unfairly when considering his nomination to the Supreme Court by focusing on allegations he vehemently denied, namely that he killed Christine Blasey Ford sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers.
Now Kavanaugh will be among the justices hearing the case over Trump's future, as will Trump's other two justices, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Kafer isn't worried about them being influenced by who nominated them and sees the judges as fair brokers.
“They love the Constitution and the country, but they also know they are under a microscope,” she said.
“Everything that is human is flawed, but the Supreme Court seems to me to be the most functional part of our system right now because you don't see them bad-mouthing each other.
They don’t tweet.”
Another judge, Clarence Thomas, faced calls to recuse himself from cases involving Trump because his wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, urged the White House and lawmakers to overturn the election.
Anderson said she realizes she could lose the case, but she believes the lawsuit is still worth it.
Either way, the challenge will help more people "realize how serious Jan. 6 was and that dear Donald was a part of it," she said.
To the author
Patrick Marley
writes about election issues in the Upper Midwest for The Washington Post.
He previously covered the Wisconsin Capitol for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 5, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.