Judge Who Removed Trump from Ballot Was Originally Working in Traffic Court
It has been revealed that the Illinois judge who went against previous state rulings to yank Donald Trump off the state’s primary ballots has little background in complicated election laws or the Constitution and was a mere traffic judge before she issued her ruling.
Late last month, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Tracie R. Porter decided in all her legal wisdom to ban Donald Trump from the Illinois primary ballot because he is supposedly an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, even though he has neither been convicted nor even charged with such a crime.
Porter issued her ruling in the judicial review of a case brought by five activists — Steven Anderson, Charles Holley, Jack Hickman, Ralph Cintron and Darryl Baker — who objected to Trump’s name being on the state’s ballot. The five men are members of the left-wing activist group Free Speech for People, which filed the same complaint in Michigan. Officials there ruled against removing Trump from the ballot.
“The Illinois State Board of Election shall remove Donald J. Trump from the ballot for the General Primary Election on March 19, 2024, or cause any votes cast for him to be suppressed, according to the procedures within their administrative authority,” Porter wrote in her “ruling.”
Porter made this nakedly self-promoting move even after her own state’s election board ruled that moves to bar Trump from state ballots were improper.
Cook County Judge Tracie Porter declares Trump an insurrectionist and takes him off the Illinois ballot. No time for a trial when saving democracy is at stake! LOL pic.twitter.com/fXgDch5m1Q
— Mark Mendlovitz (@MendlovitzMark) February 29, 2024
Back at the end of January, the Illinois State Board of Election unanimously ruled that Trump would remain on the Land of Lincoln’s ballots for 2024.
In its 8-0 vote, the board rejected an attempt by a far-left activist group to dump Trump from the ballot on the grounds that he is ineligible because he was involved in an “insurrection” against the government on Jan. 6, 2021, ABC News reported.
This was not good enough, as far as Porter was concerned.
Yet, even though she made her self-aggrandizing move, she also stayed her own ruling before even issuing it because she knew that the U.S. Supreme Court was taking up the eligibility issue and their decision would determine Trump’s actual eligibility, not hers.
The Trump campaign launched an appeal of Porter’s issuance, despite the stays.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Axios that they would “quickly appeal” what he described as an “unconstitutional ruling.”
“Today, an activist Democrat judge in Illinois summarily overruled the state’s board of elections and contradicted earlier decisions from dozens of other state and federal jurisdictions,” Cheung said.
But now Forbes magazine has taken a look at Porter’s past experience in law and on the bench and it shows a decided lack of any real experience in either election or constitutional law.
Not only was her bachelor’s degree earned in international business — not the law — but after earning a law degree, she spent four years as a litigation attorney with the Department of Labor, worked in private practice and academia, and was then appointed to traffic court in 2021. Apparently, her chief qualification to pronounce on constitutional and election law is that she won an election in 2022 to a seat on the circuit court in deep-blue Cook County.
In 2021, Porter even admitted that she is an activist and not really all that interested in the law. When she ran for the bench, she issued a statement saying, “My motto is impacting lives and changing communities and that is how I will approach this new position.”
Regardless of what Porter thinks, the U.S. Supreme Court is actually the court that will settle the issue when it reveals its ruling in Anderson v. Griswold, a case that will determine whether Trump “incited” any “insurrections” or not.
It seems fairly clear that Porter is just trying to get her name in the news, because it is obvious that she has no training or experience to guide her in a legal ruling to determine Trump’s eligibility to run for office on constitutional grounds.
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