Meet the 91-Year-Old Lawmaker with the Power to Disqualify Trump
Trump is being sued by Norma Anderson, who is also Anderson in the Trump v. Anderson case that the Supreme Court will hear on Thursday.
91-Year-Old Lawmaker with the Power to Disqualify Trump: Right now, Nikki Haley and Joe Biden are not Donald Trump’s biggest opponent in the race for president. It’s a former Republican lawmaker from Colorado who is 91 years old and not well known.
Trump is being sued by Norma Anderson, who is also Anderson in the Trump v. Anderson case that the Supreme Court will hear on Thursday. She wants to know if Trump can be president again after his part in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Meet the 91-Year-Old Lawmaker with the Power to Disqualify Trump
Anderson has been a Republican all her life and rose through the ranks of the Colorado Republican Party to become one of the top GOP lawmakers. She said she agreed right away to take part when asked to by a lawyer in Washington who works for the liberal government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.
“When asked, and when duty calls, you do it,” she told POLITICO. “My reason for doing it is saving democracy. Because Donald Trump will destroy our democracy.”
There is a part of the 14th Amendment that says people who “engaged in” an uprising against the United States after swearing to “support” the Constitution cannot run for office again. This is what the case is based on.
He was a Republican a long time before Trump. The Colorado Sun recently asked her about her youth games where she was “on the Dewey side” and the teams were FDR vs. Dewey. As a state lawmaker for almost twenty years, she worked her way up to become majority leader in both houses before quitting office in 2006.
But Anderson, like many others, has been troubled by how Trump has changed the Republican Party.
She said that he was the reason she left the GOP for a short time. But she chose to join the party again. She calls herself a “old-fashioned Republican” who supports freedom and policies that help businesses.
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“They’re not going to chase me out,” she said. “I will be a Republican when I die. I was born one, I will die one.”
Along with Anderson, a conservative columnist for the Denver Post and former Rep. Claudine Schneider (R-RI), who moved to Colorado after leaving Congress, also ran against Trump. In December, they got a huge victory when the Colorado Supreme Court said that Trump had, in fact, been involved in an uprising and could not run for office again. Judges in that state put off making that ruling so that the highest court in the country could have a say.
Anderson is one of a small group of former Republican politicians who have pushed for the courts to keep Trump from running for office. Twelve former Republicans in Congress and three former Republicans as governors sent briefs to the Supreme Court asking the justices to support Anderson and keep Trump off the ballot. Not many current or former Democrats made public court filings in support of Trump.
“It shouldn’t be about party. It should be about the Constitution, and that’s why you see so many Republicans supporting it,” Anderson said of the other conservatives who filed briefs. “Because they care about the Constitution.”
But there wasn’t a real split among Republicans in office. A lot of the Republican Party, including almost 200 members of Congress, the three federal party bodies, and dozens of state parties, signed on to support Trump.
Anderson said that those Republicans have left the GOP, not her. “What’s wrong with our congressmen is that they work for Trump instead of the people who elected them,” she said.
A new poll from Wisconsin has Trump tied with Biden and Haley ahead by 15 points.
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Anderson said that she has not been physically threatened like other government officials or judges involved in the 14th Amendment cases have. She also said that the political backlash she has gotten is not a big deal. “The Republicans called me a RINO, but I didn’t care,” she said. She cares more about the country’s future than the present.
“I was born four months before FDR was elected, so I’ve lived through the Great Depression. I’ve lived through World War Two, I’ve lived through two other wars, I’ve lived through good times, bad times,” she said. “So I think I understand our democracy.”
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