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.
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. “We did have a lawyer look at our filing, and that lawyer said: ‘Well you’re definitely not lawyers, either.’ ”
Brem, it turns out, is a political science professor, who teaches Zoom classes in comparative politics, political theory and 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 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, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Trump’s name should be disqualified from the ballot. I’m not going to get far into the legal weeds. That said, the issue of Trump’s eligibility in Washington has a chance of getting far pricklier for Republicans than maybe they realize.
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.”
But what’s notable is there’s another section of this same Washington 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 a single conviction this year and the GOP front-runner could easily be tossed off ballots around the country under similar “no felon candidate” laws.
These issues aren’t going to go away; with Trump’s legal troubles, they’ll likely snowball.
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.
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