MINOCQUA, WI (WSAU) – Kirk Bangstad, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company’s complaint to remove former President Trump from Wisconsin’s 2024 election ballot, has been dismissed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Bangstad filed the petition on Thursday at the Wisconsin Elections Board in Madison, according to WTMJ 4. However, WEC said in a statement that “a complaint against the Commission, against Commissioners in their official capacities, or Commission staff, warrants an ethical recusal by the body.” It is now believed that Bangstad will formally file the lawsuit in Dane County Court.
This complaint comes just hours after the Michigan Supreme Court decided that Trump would remain on the 2024 Michigan GOP presidential primary ballot and only a week after the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to remove him from their state’s ballot.
The Colorado Republican Party has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it is expected that the decision will be overturned. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said on X on Thursday that Trump’s name will still be on the ballot unless the Supreme Court says otherwise before the Jan. 5 certification deadline.
The lawsuits all revolve around the unprecedented legal argument that state election officials have the authority to remove a candidate based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, which was ratified three years after the Civil War and prohibits public officials who took an oath of allegiance to the United States Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution.
Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz weighed in on Colorado’s Supreme Court decision, saying in a Daily Mail op-ed that the court’s decision was a “power grab” because “the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended for it to be used to deny voters the right to decide who their next president would be in all future elections.”
Dershowitz further argued in his piece that even if Trump were to be convicted of attempting to overthrow an election in Washington, DC, or Georgia, that would not justify invoking the 14th Amendment because the text does not make the disqualification provisions applicable to a presidential candidate.
Bangstad has been at the forefront of numerous legal battles in recent months, including a defamation lawsuit where he was found guilty and ordered to pay $750,000 to Gregg Walker, part-owner of the Minocqua-based Lakeland Times after he made claims that Walker purposefully allowed his brother to die from wounds suffered during a hunting accident to inherit the newspaper.
Court documents from the defamation lawsuit pointed toward social media posts in which Bangstad stated that Walker was a “misogynist”, and even went as far as to accuse him of mistreating his father who was suffering from dementia.
The Brewing Company is also in an ongoing legal battle with the town of Minocqua after they filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin, which claims that members of the town board have been retaliating against the company due to Bangstad’s political views. Court documents allege that the business’s Administrative Review Permit was rejected as part of that retaliation.
