Raskin Says Clarence Thomas Should Recuse Himself In Trump Ballot Removal Cases

"Oh, he absolutely should recuse himself,” the Maryland Democrat said. “The question is: What do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Democrat, said on Sunday that he believes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself if the high court decides to hear cases regarding decisions in some states on whether to remove Donald Trump from primary ballots in 2024.

The Maryland Democrat’s remarks came after officials in Colorado and Maine recently decided that the former president and current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination is not eligible to appear on their ballots, citing the Constitution’s insurrection clause.

“It was actually two very conservative legal scholars who wrote the best, most authoritative law review article on the whole thing, saying that Donald Trump is clearly disqualified from being on the ballot because he participated in insurrection,” Raskin told co-anchor Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “So this becomes a test for the originalists and the textualists on the Supreme Court. And I think all of the justices from left to right call themselves textualists and originalists.”

“The language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is very clear,” he said of the Civil War-era clause. “It says if you have sworn an oath to support the Constitution and violated the oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion, you can never hold public office again. And the original purposes of it are equally clear, because actually, when the language was first authored by the radical Republicans in Congress, it was very broad.”

Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, also served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The bipartisan panel concluded that Trump and his allies carried out a plan to keep him in power, including inciting the insurrection at the Capitol as Congress met to certify the presidential vote. Trump currently faces charges in multiple cases related to the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.