Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said on Sunday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from Donald Trump’s 14th Amendment cases when they come before the court.
Two states so far–Maine and Colorado–have disqualified Trump from their state ballot under the 14th Amendment due to his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Trump campaign is expected to challenge the decisions and the case will likely end up being decided by the Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas’ wife, Ginni, is a vocal supporter of the big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
“He absolutely should recuse himself,” Raskin said of Thomas. “The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”
Raskin also dismissed claims that the Maine ruling made Trump a “martyr.”
“The question is, what does the Constitution say? Donald Trump can strike the pose of the martyr in any given context,” Raskin said. “If he’s allowed to stay on the ballot, despite his clear incitement of an insurrection and attempt to overturn the results in the 2020 election, and he loses to Joe Biden as he almost certainly would, he will feel himself a martyr there, and he will try to overturn the election result again.”
“So I don’t think we can run scared from Donald Trump,” he continued. “We have got to enforce our Constitution. And that certainly was the design of the framers, and that’s what they would have us do.”
