A Paris Republican is moving to impeach Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows because she ruled Donald Trump ineligible for the state 2024 primary ballot.
Rep. John Andrews said Thursday night he filed a request with the Maine Revisor’s Office for a joint order to impeach Bellows, a Democrat.
In his letter requesting the order, Andrews wrote that Trump has met the qualifications to be on the ballot and that his name should be allowed to appear on it during the upcoming primaries.
“This is hyper-partisanship on full display. A Secretary of State APPOINTED by legislative Democrats bans President Trump from the 2024 ballot so that she can jockey for position in the 2026 Democrat Primary for Governor. Banana Republic isn’t just a store at the mall,” Andrews said in a social media statement.
Andrews sits on the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, which oversees state elections and the secretary of state’s office.
The Maine Constitution vests the House with the sole power to impeach, while the Senate shall have the power to try impeachments. The Democrats’ strong majorities in both the House and Senate will make any impeachment of Bellows unlikely unless Republicans can peel off enough votes from her party. The Maine Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to convict during an impeachment trial, and Democrats currently control about 63 percent of the chamber’s seats.
In a 34-page ruling issued Thursday, Bellows wrote that Trump’s actions before the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, sometimes referred to as the “insurrection clause.” That follows a similar decision from the Colorado Supreme Court earlier this month that barred Trump from that state’s ballot.
“I do not reach this conclusion lightly. Democracy is sacred,” Bellows wrote in her decision. “I am mindful that no secretary of state has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”
That decision has been fiercely criticized by Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Susan Collins who said Thursday night that Bellows is denying Maine voters their choice.
“Maine voters should decide who wins the election – not a Secretary of State chosen by the Legislature,” Collins wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The legal theory behind the Trump challenges, which was fueled by two conservative law professors and is now being pushed by national progressives, is that the open-ended language means that the 14th Amendment can be applied to presidents.
It never has been, and judges have generally ruled to that effect. On Wednesday, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Trump remains eligible for the ballot. A lower-court judge in Colorado said the disqualification does not apply to the president.
Colorado’s high court invalidated that ruling in part because the state has a specific provision in state law allowing the disqualification of constitutionally ineligible candidates. In Maine, the secretary of state is empowered to disqualify a candidate if any part of their declaration — which includes an oath saying they are eligible for office — is deemed false.
It’s unclear what happens next, but a likely next step for the Trump campaign would be to challenge Bellows’ decision in Superior Court.
BDN writer Michael Shepherd contributed to this report.
