The year is shaping up to be a bitter and contentious one, so it’s probably good to head into it with a sense of humor.
Score an early point then for Robert Brem, a Port Orchard 65-year-old who is challenging Donald Trump’s eligibility to be on the ballot in Washington state.
The state Republican chairman, Jim Walsh, had branded Brem’s petition “a ridiculous bit of political theater.” And then, keeping it classy as he always does, Walsh called Brem and his fellow Kitsap County plaintiffs “angry weirdos.”
So I asked Brem about that. Are you angry weirdos?
“We’re not angry,” he said. A beat.
He went on.
“We did have a lawyer look at our filing, and that lawyer said: ‘Well you’re definitely not lawyers, either.’ ”
Ha ha. Brem, it turns out, is a political science professor, who teaches Zoom classes in comparative politics, political theory and (ahem) the U.S. Constitution at two colleges down in California, the College of Alameda and California State University, East Bay.
His complaint, filed with seven other local voters, argues that at the close of the last presidency, Trump participated in, or at minimum helped whip up, an insurrection. Which the dictionary says is a “rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government.” So consequently, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Trump’s name should be disqualified from the ballot.
I’m not going to get too far into the legal weeds on this round, because the U.S. Supreme Court will probably decide the constitutional part, not courts here. That said, the issue of Trump’s eligibility in Washington state has a chance of getting far pricklier for Republicans than maybe they realize.
For starters, our state law for removing candidates from the ballot is wide-ranging. It’s RCW 29A.68, “Contesting an Election.” In one section, it allows voters to ask the courts to boot any candidate off the ballot who has been “charged … with a wrongful act,” unless that candidate can show he or she will “desist from the wrongful act.”
Trump is a candidate who has been charged with 91 felonies, and who has expressed zero interest in desisting from any of them. He hasn’t gone to trial yet, though, so it’s hard to know if the law would apply.
For democracy, though, he poses a different conundrum: What should a voting system do with a candidate who has shown he won’t abide by the outcomes of the voting system?
Trump tried to overturn an election once, with Jan. 6 and slates of fake electors. Brem says this is the crux of the petition: The Constitution suggests not giving someone who tries to subvert democracy access to any controls of the democracy again.
But if that’s too much of a stretch, what’s notable is there’s another section of this same Washington state code that lists much more concrete reasons for removing a candidate from the ballot. For instance, if the candidate has been “convicted of a felony by a court of competent jurisdiction, the conviction not having been reversed nor the person’s civil rights restored after the conviction.”
“I will definitely file another petition to have Donald Trump removed from the ballot if he’s convicted of any one of those 91 felonies,” Brem said. “That one’s spelled out right in our state statute.”
It seems incredible the extreme risk Republicans are taking right now — for their own party’s future, if nothing else. Trump is already getting shellacked in civil courts. Criminal courts do have a higher bar, but just a single conviction later this year and the GOP front-runner could easily be tossed off election ballots around the country under similar “no felon candidate” laws as the one here in Washington state.
“From what I can see, they simply don’t care about any of that,” Brem said of Republicans.
GOP caucusgoers at the first voting in Iowa the other night told pollsters that by a 65% to 31% margin, they felt Trump was fit to be president even if he’s convicted of crimes.
“It’s not the Republican Party I grew up with,” says Brem, who adds he was a Republican himself until about age 25. “It’s not conservative.”
These issues aren’t going to go away; with Trump’s legal troubles, they’ll likely snowball, no matter what happens with this first petition. It doesn’t matter what names one calls the people bringing it to the fore.
Walsh, the current GOP chairman, also derided Brem and his group as “low-information eccentrics.” The first part is silly — Brem is a professor who bent my ear about constitutional and political theory for nearly an hour.
But eccentric? That means unconventional. There’s no doubt that debating if a presidential candidate is too toxic for democracy is a new one on all of us.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if what seems eccentric now will be just another conventional wisdom by the fall.
