Maine Democrat Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has "absolutely no authority" to block former President Donald Trump from the 2024 primary ballot, but while that will not hold up to legal challenges, former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., told Newsmax it is merely a cash and political capital grab by a far-left Democrat.
"I wouldn't be surprised she's raised millions of dollars already," Santorum told Saturday's "America Right Now." "I'm sure she's put out fundraising solicitations to be the next hero, so she can run for Congress or run for the Senate.
"If I were Susan Collins, I suspect she's her next opponent.
"But this is what it's all about. It's not about doing the right thing."
Bellows moved to block Trump from the Maine ballot, but the move will not work, because Maine Republicans can just work around her activism, according to Santorum, who said it was merely giving into the anti-Trump "mob."
"She has absolutely no authority to do this," Santorum told host Tom Basile. "She cannot do this. We're seeing this increasingly. We see it out of presidents. We see it as secretaries of state. You see it out of the courts.
"They don't really look at their constitutional authority and their legal authority. They do what is to please the mob, the base of the Democratic Party. It's almost like the Colosseum.
"You get the mob on your side, and in her case, the mob on her side is the progressive base of the Democratic Party who hates Donald Trump."
It is an abuse of power that has become all too common in American politics now, Santorum lamented.
"It's not about following the law, following the Constitution, it's about following the best political course for you in a country where they, unfortunately – the left and right base – have almost abandoned our constitution, abandoned the rule of law and said 'might makes right,'" Santorum said. "And the Democrats have been doing this for a long time."
Any talk of Republicans responding in kind is wrong, too, Santorum warned.
"My concern is that Republicans – I'm hearing more and more Republicans say, 'Well, we need to do the same thing; they did this; we need to do this'; and that's where I think that the danger is on our side," Santorum said.
"They have gone so far so often that now a lot of folks on our side are saying we need to do the same thing, which I think is wrong."
Republicans must remain about the "rule of law," Santorum concluded.
"I understand the frustration of folks on our side: 'Look, they do this, and they get away with it,'" Santorum said. "Well, they get away with it for a little bit. I mean already the Republican Party of Maine has come out and said, you know, we're just going to bypass her. We will do a caucus. And as you know, caucuses are not run by the state. They're not run by the secretary of state.
"And so they can just, you know, put Trump on their own ballot and run their own separate caucus, so there's ways to get around this legally.
"I think we just have to keep that in mind that we are a party of rule of law. Just because they don't pay attention to it doesn't mean that it's wise for us to do the same."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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