Thread by @mtracey

It's really wild that the Maine Secretary of State just seized the power to unilaterally block presidential candidates from the ballot, based on a brand new non-judicial administrative procedure she literally just made up herself, supposedly to enforce the federal 14th Amendment

Shenna Bellows, who was never popularly elected statewide, says the usual rules of evidence don't apply to her newly-invented procedure, which is governed by Maine administrative law, therefore authorizing her to accept the Jan 6 Committee Report as admissible probative evidence

Using her newly-invented personal administrative procedure, Bellows decrees a newly-expansive definition of "insurrection" for the State of Maine, watering down the concept to the point of asserting that an "insurrection" need not feature weapons or "involve bloodshed"

Bellows declares she is "obligated" to issue a unilateral definition of "insurrection" in Maine, under the federal 14th Amendment, using a newly-invented administrative procedure, thanks to the precedent of a 1996 dispute by a state employee over disability retirement benefits

The all-knowing Secretary of State also grants herself the power to make conclusive determinations about Trump's state of mind, using the intrepid evidentiary technique of copying and pasting his old tweets

The most powerful state official you never heard of before today has also taken the liberty to unilaterally terminate any First Amendment protections for Trump's political speech

She does reaffirm that "Democracy is sacred," and even though no Secretary of State in the history of the United States has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access in this manner, she's doing it very sacredly. So, that's nice

A quick peek into the state of mind of the Secretary of State

REMINDER: Maine allocates its electoral votes by congressional district -- Trump won the 2nd congressional district in both 2016 and 2020, awarding him one electoral vote in Maine