Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows removed Donald Trump from the state's 2024 ballot. A superior court judge stopped her. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the legal theory behind her move unanimously, all nine justices, including the three liberal members. Now Bellows is running for governor and treating that rejected action as a campaign credential.
That is the state of Democratic politics in 2025: an official whose signature constitutional gambit failed at every level of judicial review is selling it as proof of her courage.
The former ACLU executive director in Maine has posted videos referencing her decision to bar Trump from the primary ballot. In one, she claimed she attempted to instruct Trump on the Constitution and quipped that "the president clearly didn't get the copy of the Constitution I sent him." In another, she declared, "There are no kings in America... We have a democracy." She has described the January 6 events as "an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election" and framed her ballot-removal effort as an act of "bravery."
Bellows' effort did not survive contact with the judiciary. A superior court judge in Maine enjoined her decision. She then repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get the matter before a higher court, according to legal commentator Jonathan Turley.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, addressed the same legal theory in the Colorado case, and dismantled it. The justices ruled 9-0 that individual states could not unilaterally remove a presidential candidate from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment without congressional authorization. The Court's language was pointed.
"Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos."
That was the Court's assessment of the legal framework Bellows and like-minded officials tried to invoke. Not a close call. Not a split decision. Nine to zero. Every liberal justice joined the majority.
Even within her own party, the move drew criticism. Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden denounced Bellows' decision to bar Trump from the primary. When a member of your own caucus calls out the overreach, the "bravery" framing starts to look less like principle and more like political positioning.
Bellows is not alone. Turley, a law professor and author, has described a broader pattern among Democratic candidates who are running on pledges to circumvent or stretch constitutional limits in the name of opposing Trump. He characterizes the approach as a "by any means necessary" posture toward constitutional governance.
George Conway, now a New York congressional candidate, has pledged to ease impeachment rules to secure the removal of both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That pledge treats the Constitution's most serious accountability mechanism, impeachment, as a tool to be loosened for partisan convenience. The administration, for its part, has moved in the opposite direction, with Vance tapped to lead a government-wide fraud investigation aimed at restoring accountability inside federal agencies.
The common thread is an eagerness to treat extraordinary constitutional powers as ordinary political weapons, then to campaign on having wielded them, regardless of whether courts upheld the action.
Bellows' messaging rests on a familiar contradiction. She claims to be defending democracy. But her specific act, removing a major-party candidate from the ballot before voters could weigh in, was the opposite of letting democracy work. A secretary of state, an appointed or elected administrative officer, decided which presidential candidates the people of Maine were permitted to choose. The courts said no. The voters ultimately chose Trump anyway; he won the election.
The question voters in Maine's gubernatorial race will have to answer is whether an official who lost unanimously at the Supreme Court, and who now treats that loss as a badge of honor, can be trusted to respect the boundaries of executive authority as governor. The track record suggests she views those boundaries as suggestions.
Election integrity has become a flashpoint nationally. Concerns about who belongs on the ballot, who is eligible to vote, and how elections are administered are not abstract. They play out in real cases, from illegal immigrants charged with voting in multiple presidential elections to state officials making unilateral decisions about ballot access.
The constitutional order depends on officials who accept the limits of their own power, even when they believe the cause is righteous. Bellows did not accept those limits. She pushed past them, got stopped by a judge, tried again at a higher level, and got stopped by the entire Supreme Court. Now she wants a promotion.
President Trump has made election security a priority, pressing Congress on measures like voter ID requirements. He has vowed to pursue voter ID for future elections by executive order if legislators fail to act, an approach that works through the political process rather than around it.
Bellows' gubernatorial pitch amounts to this: I defied the courts, lost at every level, and I'd do it again. She frames it as standing up for democracy. But democracy already had a mechanism for dealing with candidates voters didn't want. It's called an election.
The Supreme Court, including justices appointed by Democratic presidents, concluded that what Bellows and her Colorado counterparts attempted would produce constitutional chaos. That is not a partisan talking point. It is the holding of the nation's highest court, stated in plain English.
Democrats who attempt to manipulate ballot access are not the only ones testing the system's limits. Courts have also refused to rescue a Democrat who tried to get onto Ohio's Republican ballot through procedural maneuvering. The pattern is consistent: when officials or candidates try to game the process, courts push back.
What makes the Bellows case distinctive is not the legal defeat, plenty of officials lose in court. It is the decision to campaign on the defeat as though it were a victory. She is asking Maine voters to reward her for an act that nine Supreme Court justices, across the ideological spectrum, said the Constitution does not permit.
Meanwhile, legislative efforts to shore up election integrity continue at the federal level. The push for the SAVE America Act reflects a growing demand that election rules be set through lawful channels, not improvised by state officials acting on their own authority.
Turley, in his recent book "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution," has examined the broader tendency to abandon constitutional constraints under the pressure of political passions. Bellows' campaign fits that pattern neatly. The passion was real. The constitutional authority was not.
A secretary of state who removes a presidential frontrunner from the ballot, gets overruled by every court that reviews the action, and then runs for higher office on the strength of that overruled decision is not defending the system. She is advertising her willingness to override it.
Maine deserves a governor who reads the Constitution and follows it, not one who mails a copy to her political opponents and ignores it herself.
