With the state’s presidential primary just weeks away, a Massachusetts commission being asked to remove former president Donald Trump’s name from the state’s GOP presidential ballot is weighing whether it even has the jurisdiction to consider such a challenge.
The state Ballot Law Commission met Thursday in a brief pre-hearing conference, where it took statements from attorneys. Its three members gave no indication of how they could rule.
The panel — composed of two Democrats and one Republican — is considering two nearly identical challenges filed by the group Free Speech For People and attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, a former Democratic candidate for state attorney general.
Both argue that Trump is ineligible to serve in the White House under the Constitution’s 14th amendment because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol when he “engaged in rebellion and insurrection against the Constitution of the United States.”
The commission is required to issue a decision on the petitions by Jan. 29, Liss-Riordan said.
Liss-Riordan, a labor attorney, said Thursday that Secretary of State William F. Galvin was wrong to place Trump on the ballot after the state Republican Party submitted Trump’s name. Galvin, a Democrat, has said that state law does not block candidates who would be ineligible to serve from appearing on the ballot before voters.
“Regardless of whether Secretary Galvin thought it was his obligation to do what the Republican Party asked him to do, it is this [Ballot Law] Commission’s obligation to enforce the law and reverse Secretary Galvin’s incorrect decision,” she said.
The state is slated to hold its presidential primary on March 5. Federal law requires state officials to send absentee ballots to military and overseas voters within 45 days of a federal election, meaning for Maine and other so-called Super Tuesday states, they must go out by Sunday.
Marc Salinas, a North Andover attorney representing Trump in the challenge, echoed Galvin’s argument Thursday, telling commissioners that there is nothing in state law that makes being qualified for the office a “pre-condition” to actually appear on the ballot. He used a hypothetical example of the state Republican Party choosing a 12-year-old to appear on the ballot, even though the Constitution requires the president be at least 35 years old.
“As absurd as it might seem . . . once the Republican Party asks that, under the statute, [that person] be placed on the ballot, the candidate must appear on the ballot,” Salinas said. He called any move by the commission to intervene to be “premature at this point.”
“There’s no legal basis to deny somebody access to the ballot, purely on the issue of disqualification,” he said.
The panel’s members are appointed by the governor and meet as needed. It’s designed to be a five-person bipartisan commission but currently has three members: Francis Crimmins Jr., a Republican and former district court judge who chairs the commission; Joseph Eisenstadt, a Democrat; and Joseph Boncore, a Democrat, former state senator, and onetime head of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.
Crimmins on Thursday gave both sides until the end of day Friday to file any other documents. He closed the meeting Thursday roughly 15 minutes after it started, and cut off Liss-Riordan when she began asking about the possibility of the commission holding a hearing on the challenge.
“We’re adjourned,” he said. “Thanks.”
The challenges followed dozens of similar ones in other states, including in Maine, where the secretary of state last month barred Trump from the state’s Republican primary. In Colorado, the state Supreme Court also ruled Trump was ineligible for the White House under a rarely used clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Both those decisions, however, are on hold. Trump appealed the Colorado ruling to the Supreme Court, and a Maine judge on Wednesday paused acting on an appeal of the secretary’s decision there, to allow time for the Supreme Court to rule in the other case.
Thomas Hodgson, a former Bristol County sheriff who is chair of Trump’s campaign in Massachusetts, dismissed arguments Thursday that Trump is an insurrectionist, and accused court and state officials of “cherry picking words” from Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 just before his supporters violently attacked the Capitol. (Trump has also been indicted on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election, and hundreds more have been convicted in prosecutions of the riot.)
“[They’re] saying he used the term, the word ‘fight,’ as though he was suggesting, ‘go up there and fight,’” Hodgson told reporters after Thursday’s hearing. “The majority of people that were there would say that’s not what he said. He said, ‘Go there peacefully.’”
Trump, at one point, in the speech suggested “that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” But he repeatedly told his supporters to “fight” and warned that, if the results of the election were certified, “you will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.”
“If you don’t fight like hell,” Trump said that day, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.