With the decision of the Secretary of State in Maine, we now have the second of the fifty states that have tossed Trump from the primary ballot. (Colorado, of course, was the first.) This issue is definitely headed up to the Supreme Court sooner or later. (California’s Secretary of State later decided to keep Trump on the California ballot, announcing that her office will “continue to assess” options, including the result of any action taken by the U.S. Supreme Court on the matter.)

I just wanted to point out that the question of who gets to be on a primary ballot is different from the decision of who gets to be on a general election ballot. This is a distinction that not everyone has picked up on yet.

Primaries are largely under control of the two major political parties here in the United States. Rules for state primaries are different from state to state. In some states, if you pick up a Democratic or Republican ballot on primary day, you are automatically registered (or re-registered) in the party whose ballot you picked up. In other states, not so much. Some states allow independents to vote in any primary; in some states, you have to be registered as a party member to vote in a Democratic or Republican primary.

Now, when it comes to qualifications for President, there are only three provided by the Constitution: you must be at least 35 years of age on inauguration day, you must be a natural born citizen, and even if a natural-born citizen, you must have lived in the United States for the last fourteen years.

Simple.

Now imagine that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born former Governor of California, and David Hogg, the 23-year old wunderkind gun control activist (and one of the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting) wanted to run for President on the Republican and Democratic ticket respectively in 2024. It’s clear that both of them are disqualified: Schwarzenegger was not born in the United States, and Hogg will be nowhere near 35 on inauguration day in 2025.

Should they be allowed on a primary ballot?

The sensible answer is no. The reason is that if they were to win the nomination and be elected President, they wouldn’t be able to serve.

So why indulge the charade at the primary level?

That is essentially the same question with Donald Trump. The Übergroppenführer is ostensibly qualified, as he is over 35, American born, and has lived here for more than 14 years. But he is arguably nevertheless disqualified because he violated the 14th amendment when he engaged in an insurrection.

A number of states have chosen to punt rather than to answer the difficult question of whether Trump should be allowed on the ballot. One of the mechanisms for that punting has been to say, essentially, primaries are run by parties, and this is a question for the general election ballot.

Which, from the example I cited above, is mostly nonsense.

Maine and Colorado have been two of the states who have been willing to address the question head on, and in both states they have come to the reasonable conclusion that a man who swore an oath to protect the Constitution as President and then engaged in an insurrection in violation of the 14th amendment, should not be allowed on the primary ballots. He should be disqualified.