Via the AP: Maine secretary of state who opted to keep Trump off primary ballot is facing threat of impeachment.
Although, really, the threat is pretty anemic:
At least one Republican lawmaker has vowed to pursue impeachment against Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows despite long odds in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
[…]
In Maine, state Rep. John Andrews, who sits on the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, called the decision “hyper-partisanship on full display” as he pressed for an impeachment proceeding. He said he sent a notice to the state revisor’s office for a joint order to set the wheels in motion ahead of lawmakers’ return to Augusta next week.
“There is bipartisan opposition to the extreme decision made by the secretary of state. She has clearly overstepped her authority. It remains to be seen if her effort at voter suppression will garner enough Democrat support to remove her from her position,” said House Republican leader Billy Bob Faulkingham.
It is a small thing, to be sure, but whenever I read/hear Republicans use “Democrat” instead of “Democratic” it just makes me take whatever they are saying less seriously (and to be clear, I don’t take this “threat” especially seriously). The desire to play this ongoing petty insult game is just childish.
Again, while I think that SCOTUS is likely to overturn Colorado and Maine on this issue, I think that Secretary of State Bellows had every legal right to act as she did. See my post, The Maine Ruling, for details.
This does remind me to comment on something I meant to note in my post, Tit, Meet Tat, which is the following from the NBC piece reporting on Missouri’s Secretary of State possibly seeking to bar Biden from his state’s ballot:
The Maine case is slightly different than the one in Colorado. There, the Democratic secretary of state made the determination that Trump was ineligible for the ballot.
Ashcroft said he broadly didn’t believe secretaries should be involved in deciding who is on the ballot.
This is an example of the ongoing lazy reporting on this issue. It makes it sound like the Maine SoS acted capriciously and unilaterally without any due process. But as I note my post on the subject, there is a black letter legal role for the Maine SoS to make determinations about eligibility in light of voter challenges. There was a process, that included input from Trump’s lawyers. And, again I would note, they do not seek to defend him against the charge of insurrection, but instead play procedural games.
I originally was under the impression that the Maine SoS simply declared Trump ineligible, but that was because of reporting as I noted above.
Regardless, this is just another example of the feckless approach to impeachment that we are seeing at the present moment, which is part of the broader tit-for-tat cycle that we appear to be in.
