by Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner
January 8, 2024
Minocqua brewery owner Kirk Bangstad filed a lawsuit Friday in Dane County Circuit Court, taking another step in his effort to keep Donald Trump off the ballot in Wisconsin this year.
Late last month, Bangstad had filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) seeking the same thing. The six members of the commission rejected his complaint within a few hours. Bangstad is the founder of a political fundraising operation, the Minocqua Brewing Company Super Pac, and has filed several lawsuits with progressive aims — including one which sought to dismantle the state’s school voucher program — and regularly sparred with conservative local officials in his community.
Bangstad is filing the lawsuit in the hopes that eventually the Wisconsin Supreme Court will join the courts in Colorado and Maine in deciding to keep Trump off the ballot in those states. The suits in other states and Bangstad’s rest on the argument that when Trump worked to encourage the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 he had committed an act of insurrection. Under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War, anyone who has engaged in an insurrection against the U.S. government is barred from holding federal office.
“Just shy of four years after taking an oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution as President of the United States, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, leading to a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol to stop the lawful transfer of power to his successor,” Bangstad’s lawsuit states. “By instigating this unprecedented assault on the American constitutional order, Trump violated his oath and disqualified himself from holding public office, including the Office of the President, under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the cases, though it is expected to and with a conservative majority on that Court, Trump is likely to be allowed on state ballots.
At a press conference outside the Dane County courthouse Friday afternoon, Bangstad compared his lawsuit to taking someone’s driver’s license away after several drunk driving offenses. Eventually, he said, there must be legal consequences for bad decisions.
“If you’ve continuously driven drunk, like a lot of people who come to the Dane County courthouse,” he said, “if you keep driving drunk, you will ultimately lose your license. Should that person be able to say, ‘They’ve taken my choice to drive away?’ No, that person should say, if they were honest with themselves, ‘I forfeited my choice to drive, because I did illegal things.’”
Bangstad added that the lawsuit isn’t an effort to take away people’s right to vote for Trump, but is instead holding Trump accountable for his actions when political leaders and other officials have failed to do so. He pointed to both U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul as two figures who should have acted more forcefully “to protect our country.”
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