COUY GRIFFIN: Could this man — barred from state office — be Trump’s next VP?
Couy Griffin, the “Cowboys for Trump” leader, got smacked down at the Supreme Court this week — but his idol Donald Trump didn’t.
When Trump was booted off state ballots for participating in an insurrection, the Supreme Court gave him perhaps his most consequential win since the 2016 election: they ruled that the Constitution’s insurrection clause cannot be enforced at the state level in federal races.
In short, state boards of elections can prevent an insurrectionist from running for state offices, but not for federal ones.
While a few Members of Congress have been challenged with the same Constitutional provision, so far the one judicial success in barring insurrectionists has been the removal of Couy Griffin, a leader of Cowboys for Trump who was convicted for his role in the January 6th attack and subsequently removed from his County Commissioner seat in Otero County, New Mexico.
Couy has been fighting his removal through the court system since it was ordered nearly two years ago, and the Supreme Court just gave him a final loss in that pursuit by refusing to even hear his case. Lower courts had consistently upheld his removal, and on Monday, the Supreme Court updated his docket to say that his petition had been denied.
His filing had argued that the attack on the Capitol was not actually an insurrection and that removing him from office constituted an attack on his free speech.
Now that his bid for reinstatement to local office is out, however, Griffin has a new goal: the vice presidency.
While Trump has floated a few options, he hasn’t officially named a running mate to be his VP yet, and Couy seems to think he has a shot. He posted on Twitter:
‘I’m officially barred thru a court order of running for any other office other than the office of President. I wonder if that holds true to the office of Vice President?”
In a subsequent post, he said that being ineligible now for any office except the presidency or the VP, he was “praying for God to open that door.”
Griffin repeatedly tagged Trump’s Twitter account — which has been silent since a single post last year in which the former president shared his mugshot — while sharing a photo of the two together in the White House.
Trump, for his part, has shown no sign of interest in coming to Griffin’s rescue. While he’s talked about what he calls injustice and unfairness in sentencing for January 6th rioters, he’s carried out no similar campaign for the Cowboys for Trump founder’s job, though he did, back in 2020, repost a video clip of Griffin saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” and thanking him for his support, according to the Washington Post.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Griffin is ironically eligible to run for the top offices in the country, though he can’t be a County Commissioner.
Make it make sense!
See his VP plea to Trump below.
