Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis floated the idea of removing President Joe Biden from the ballot following the Maine and Colorado decisions to force former President Donald Trump from their states’ primary election ballots.
The governor said that his state is considering whether or not Florida could remove Biden from the ballot in direct response to Trump’s removal from Maine’s secretary of state.
DeSantis said that it was improper to have “one election official decide that somebody is guilty of, quote, ‘insurrection,’ when there has not been a criminal conviction of anybody, much less the candidate himself, that opens up Pandora’s box.”
The governor added that he was “actually looking at this in Florida now.” He asked whether or not Biden’s response to the increase of migrants crossing the southern border.
DeSantis said that he was opposed to “tit-for-tat” retaliations for such decisions. However, he added that he was opposed to “fighting with one hand tied behind your back.”
“Whatever the rules are applied to us, we’re going to fight back and apply the rules the other way,” said DeSantis. “I do think the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to take the case. I do think they’re going to have to rein this in because I just think, if you look at it, it just becomes too different.”
In a related note, the candidate was asked about how he would have differed from the former president regarding his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. DeSantis said that he would have “won the election, and it would never been an issue.”
Ron DeSantis on Donald Trump's attacks against other Republicans: "You don't want to be using your energy to go after someone in the party who's doing everything the voters want us to do."
"If that's where the energy is, rather than fighting the folks who are causing the… pic.twitter.com/HqbES9lEMo
— Never Back Down (@NvrBackDown24) January 6, 2024
Instead, DeSantis talked about a number of other issues, saying that if Trump was nominated “2024 is going to focus on his legal issues, criminal trials, Jan. 6 and really all these things from the past, and that’s going to subsume everything.”
DeSantis’ comments came as the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court decision, which would have major implications regarding ballot access and the 2024 election.
Trump’s legal team argued that the Colorado decision did not meet the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s ‘insurrection’ clause. Furthermore, the president’s attorneys argued that the Supreme Court should also decide whether or not Trump engaged in ‘insurrection.’
