Republicans Are Tripping Over Each Other to Defend Trump After Colorado Ruling

Republicans are up in arms over Donald Trump getting banned from the Colorado presidential ballot, a sign of how much power he still has in the party.

The Colorado Supreme Court issued a historic decision late Tuesday, ruling 4–3 that Trump had engaged in the January 6 insurrection and was therefore disqualified from running for office again. Republicans have, predictably, fallen in line behind him.

Multiple lawmakers accused the state’s Supreme Court of election interference and voter suppression—which is pretty ironic given that the GOP opposes laws that would expand voter rights and 147 of its members in Congress voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the ruling as “nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack,” while Representative Elise Stefanik predicted the decision will “backfire and further strengthen President Trump’s winning campaign to Save America.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is not-so-secretly gunning to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, demanded the U.S. Supreme Court take up the case.

“The Democrats and 4 Colorado judges just stole the election away from the people of Colorado and robbed them of their right to vote for President Trump,” she said on X, formerly Twitter.

“This is an unprecedented First amendment violation that must be struck down by the SCOTUS.”

Senator Mike Lee called the ruling “lawless thuggery masquerading as jurisprudence” and then shared a very strange animation of dancing bananas, implying the U.S. is a “banana republic.”

“This irresponsible ruling will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and our legal team looks forward to helping fight for a victory,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel wrote on X.

Trump’s Republican primary opponents also slammed the ruling, instead of viewing it as an opportunity to actually beat the current front-runner. Nikki Haley said the decision should have been left to the voters instead of the judicial system, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis accused Democrats of “abusing judicial power.”

Even Chris Christie, whose campaign platform is basically that he’s a Trump hater, said the ruling was “premature” because Trump hasn’t yet been tried for inciting insurrection. He also said the voters, not the courts, should decide whether Trump becomes president.

Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign is but a series of trolly stunts, pledged in a social media screed to withdraw his name from the Colorado ballot if Trump isn’t on it, which sounds more like a massive self-own than a measured protest.

Donald Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that his anti-immigrant rhetoric is being compared to Hitler’s—and then he showed how little that bothered him, repeating much of the same vile language.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country,” said Trump during a campaign rally in Iowa, echoing language from Hitler’s Nazi manifesto. “They don’t like it when I said that—and I never read Mein Kampf.”

“They could be healthy, they could be very unhealthy, they could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world,” the GOP front-runner continued. “And they’re destroying the blood of our country. They’re destroying the fabric of our country.”

Trump has been dipping his toe into fascist rhetoric for years, but in a couple of Veteran’s Day speeches and same-day posts on TruthSocial, he described his Democratic rivals as “vermin”—a word Hitler regularly used to dehumanize his political enemies and the Jewish people.

Then, during rallies last weekend, Trump told supporters that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and described it as “an invasion ... like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”

The former president has outright admitted that he would abuse his powers if reinstated to the White House. During a Fox News–hosted town hall earlier this month, Trump said that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one.”

And yet, Republicans seem to like this authoritarian lean. According to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll, nearly half of surveyed Republicans noted that Trump’s recent caustic language would make them more likely to back him in the upcoming election.

According to the poll, 42 percent of likely GOP caucusgoers said that Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comment made them more likely to support him, while a hair more—43 percent—said that his references to “vermin” made them feel just as supportive.

One of the respondents, 71-year-old June Koelker, told the Des Moines Register that Trump’s immigration plan made her more likely to back him, although she disagreed with his “poisoning” comment.

“The ones who are coming in now, with no children, no wife, no family, dressed fine as wine, we’re handing them money and giving them air traffic anyplace in the country,” Koelker told the paper. “And don’t you wonder—they’re all military age—what they’re here for? Our country is not safe now.”

Opponents both domestic and abroad have come out in full force against Texas’s latest immigration law, which gives local judges the authority to deport immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The law, which was signed by Governor Greg Abbott on Monday, is the amalgamation of Texas Senate Bill 3 and Texas Senate Bill 4. The first-of-its-kind policy appropriates $1.5 billion in border funding and effectively makes crossing the Texas-Mexico border a state crime, creating a new state misdemeanor for immigrants who enter or reenter the state illegally, with violations of the new crimes punishable by up to two years. The law also gives local and state police the authority to arrest immigrants whom they suspect of having unlawfully crossed into the state, as opposed to federal agencies.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the state in an effort to block the state-specific anti-immigration effort, arguing that the bill is unconstitutional and defies federal immigration law, according to the lawsuit.

“Governor Abbott’s efforts to circumvent the federal immigration system and deny people the right to due process is not only unconstitutional but also dangerously prone to error, and will disproportionately harm Black and Brown people regardless of their immigration status,” Anand Balakrishnan, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in a statement.

Abbott has responded that the state is willing to take that lawsuit all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary, reported Politico.

But they weren’t the only ones angered by the state’s creeping regulations. The nation’s southern neighbor also came out in fierce opposition to the newly minted law, promising to file a formal challenge.

“The foreign ministry is already working on the process to challenge this law,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Senator Tommy Tuberville on Tuesday criticized Donald Trump’s comments about migrants—for not being cruel enough.

Trump dived deeper into fascism over the weekend, saying Saturday that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” When asked about Trump paraphrasing Adolf Hitler, Tuberville merely backed him up.

“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that,” Tuberville told reporters. “Because have you seen what’s happening at the border? We’re being overrun. They’re taking us over. So a little bit disappointed it wasn’t tougher.”

In addition to being incredibly xenophobic and factually inaccurate, Tuberville’s response is deeply ironic. Complaints about not having strong enough protections for the country are pretty rich coming from the man who spent the past year single-handedly wrecking U.S. military readiness.

Trump also said over the weekend that he would use federal law enforcement funds to combat a “military invasion” at the southern border.

“Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities,” Trump said Sunday.

He then promised to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS.”

Tuberville, unfortunately, is the only Republican senator so far to take an explicit stance on Trump’s comments. His fellow GOP senators have opted instead for lukewarm rebukes. Senator Roger Wicker said he “certainly wouldn’t have said that,” and Senator Thom Tillis called Trump’s words “unhelpful.”

Congress had a no-good, very bad year.

As the 118th Congress winds down the first of its two-year session, it’s abundantly clear that this latest iteration has come up shockingly short, passing just 20 bills through both chambers, according to Quorum legislative data analyzed by Axios. Four additional bills are currently waiting Biden’s signature.

That’s drastically lower than previous congresses, which tallied far above 50 bills in their first year and typically passed between 300 and 450 laws.

This year’s congressional report card sank below even some of Congress’s most unproductive years, reported Axios, including the 104th, 112th, and 11th Congresses, which saw Republicans controlling the House or Senate during Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. Still, those sessions managed to pass between 70 and 73 laws.

The abysmal productivity is thanks, in large part, to historic divisions and tensions among Republicans, who are still holding onto a slim majority, effectively necessitating unanimous consent to pass sections of their agenda.

The House has also failed to come up with budgetary solutions as the government stares down another looming government shutdown just weeks after it comes back from Christmas break.

The majority of bills that were able to slip through the cracks this year were unsurprisingly uncontroversial. Those included measures to rename Veterans Affairs clinics and to mint a coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, noted Axios.

Republicans also managed to waste the better part of two months over the last year, unable to pick a leader. Given the upcoming election, it’s unlikely that next year will prove more productive.

The GOP also chose to waste time on the impeachment of President Joe Biden, which even Republican lawmakers admitted failed to tie the president to any wrongdoing, let alone illegal activity.