COLUMBIA — A federal judge has denied a Texas man’s attempt to have former President Donald Trump kicked off the Feb. 24 South Carolina GOP primary ballot on 14th Amendment grounds.
U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis found that John Anthony Castro, a tax preparer from the Fort Worth area, failed to show his lawsuit was likely enough to succeed or that the harm he was suffering was serious enough to justify a temporary restraining order that would’ve forced the South Carolina Election Commission to remove Trump’s name from the ballot.
Castro, 40, has mounted a nominal GOP presidential campaign with the primary aim of removing Trump from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds. Castro filed more than two dozen federal lawsuits seeking to do so in states around the country, including South Carolina. Federal judges have now rejected more than half a dozen of the challenges. None have succeeded.
Castro argued that Trump’s actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot amounted to his participation in an insurrection, and that he is thus ineligible to seek the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
That section, originally aimed at former Confederates after the Civil War, bars those who have previously been elected officials from serving again if they have participated in an insurrection.
Geiger Lewis, a Barack Obama appointee, didn’t tackle the constitutional questions directly, instead finding that Castro is not suffering the harms he claimed he was from Trump’s participation in the election and therefore lacks legal standing to request Trump be booted from the ballot.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the ruling a “stinging defeat” for “election interference efforts” in a statement to The Post and Courier.
Castro claimed Trump’s allegedly unconstitutional appearance on the ballot would cause him to lose votes to Trump in the Feb. 24 primary, hurting his bid for the presidency.
Geiger Lewis didn’t buy he’s running a serious campaign. Castro hasn’t visited or spent money here.
“And, to the extent Castro argues Trump will siphon voters from him if he remains a candidate, he has failed to show such harm is anything more than speculative,” she wrote in an order signed Jan. 30. “He has failed to show a likelihood that voters who would otherwise vote for Trump would instead choose to vote for him.”
The state Republican Party initially announced Castro would appear on the ballot here, but that won’t actually happen as Castro canceled the check he submitted to pay the party’s $50,000 filing fee. In court filings, Castro claimed he couldn’t pay it and sued the state party, arguing the fee is unconstitutional.
Geiger Lewis also declined to strike down the party’s fee, writing that Castro never proved he couldn’t pay it.
Castro’s lawsuit, filed in early September, always seemed to have long odds of success, especially after a federal magistrate in November recommended Geiger Lewis spike it.
The judge stopped short of throwing out the lawsuit, merely declining to kick Trump off the ballot.
It is too late to physically remove Trump’s name from the ballots in South Carolina anyway. The election commission began sending ballots to military and overseas voters Jan. 10 in accordance with federal law.
The constitutional question of whether Trump is barred from returning to the presidency under the 14th Amendment will likely be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier this month took up Trump’s appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to block him from the ballot there.
Meanwhile, Castro now faces his own legal peril.
He was arrested and indicted on 33 federal counts related to an alleged tax fraud scam Jan. 10, according to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s Office for the District of Northern Texas.
“Mr. Castro’s alleged crimes are stunning in their brazenness,” Leigha Simonton, the U.S. attorney there, said in the statement.
Castro vehemently denied those allegations and called them political retribution in an interview with The New York Times.
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