Imperial Repeal
Imperial Repeal
The Minnesota MOMS case highlights a novel executive power
Not to overstate the case or anything, but in the Minnesota MOMS case, I see the seeds of the end of the Republic.
Of course, you’ve probably not even heard of Doe v. Minnesota 62-CV-19-3868 (aka “the MOMS Case”), because nobody’s talking about it. I haven’t written about it before because I know some of the people involved,1 and, besides, the case is a little too on-brand for me. C’mon, weird procedural tricks and executive overreach in a case about eliminating protections for the unborn? Did Gov. Walz come up with this case in a lab to upset me specifically?
A couple weeks ago, though, it dawned on me that the MOMS Case is an instance of a larger problem, which (potentially) reaches beyond abortion law. I’ve seen others complain about this problem in specific cases, but, to my knowledge, nobody has recognized the larger pattern yet. You don’t need to agree with me about abortion to see that Imperial Repeal, as presented by the MOMS case, is a problem.
First, some background.
Minnesota’s Bipartisan Abortion Laws
Back in the mid-2000s, many elected Democrats in Minnesota were still pretty squeamish about the unborn lives extinguished by abortion.2 They didn’t want to actually prevent anyone from killing the unborn, but they did want to discourage it. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Republican Party had not yet become a total clown show, and still won statewide elections on a fairly regular basis.3
With a Republican governor and an abortion-squeamish DFL4 in the legislature, broad bipartisan coalitions were able to pass a range of popular, common-sense laws encouraging people to choose life. There was a law requiring abortionists to provide written information about abortion and its consequences, a law requiring a 24-hour waiting period before aborting, a law requiring higher-risk late-term abortions be performed in a hospital, and several others. Minnesota already had a law requiring parental notification when a minor aborted a child, passed in 1981 under liberal Republican governor Al Quie.
The days of Democrats who were concerned about unborn children are, alas,5 long gone. Today’s DFL wants to strip every unborn child of every protection, no matter how minor, up to the moment of birth.6 The 2018 elections got them close, but not close enough: Democrats controlled the governor’s mansion and the state House, but the Minnesota Senate had a one-seat Republican majority, blocking any move the Dems might make against the unborn.
So Gov. Walz did what any executive in a failing republic does: he bypassed the legislature and repealed the law anyway. He laundered his repeal through a sneaky little quasi-judicial process I have dubbed “Imperial Repeal.” The Minnesota MOMS case is not the only instance of Imperial Repeal I’ve seen, but it is the most bald-faced. I’ll walk you through the dance steps.
A How-To Guide to Imperial Repeal
Step Zero: Be the governor. Identify a law you want to repeal. Check whether you have the votes to repeal it through the legislature, which is (at least for now) generally easier than the alternative.
In the MOMS case, Gov. Walz wanted to repeal Minnesota’s bipartisan abortion laws.
Step One: Wait for someone to file a lawsuit arguing that the law in question is unconstitutional.
This step is very easy. For any issue controversial enough to polarize the legislature, there is almost always an interest group waiting in the wings to file lawsuits over it. All they need is favorable political winds or a subtle signal from their political allies, and, boom, lawsuit.
If you are a governor who wants to exercise Imperial Repeal and the lawsuit you’re waiting for isn’t coming, it’s easy enough to generate it. Someone in your administration has lunch with somebody from the interest group you want to file the suit. No big names, just an ordinary lunch. Your official broaches the broad subject, wonders aloud whether a court would uphold current law as constitutional, and makes a few bland comments stating the official position that the government would vigorously defend the law… including some carefully-worded statements highlighting what the government views as the law’s weak points. You can add a big theatrical wink at the end of the conversation, but you don’t have to. Most lawyers aren’t idiots.
The person from the interest group nods occasionally and listens to subtext, then goes back to the office and says, “Hey, guess what? I just had lunch with someone in the Attorney General’s office, and they want us to file a lawsuit. Here are some arguments they think we should make.”
I’m not high in the corridors of power, but even I’ve been around enough politics to know how business gets done. You know how politicians communicate with supposedly “independent” Super PACs? Same thing. Again, you probably don’t even have to have the lunch.
Either way, you end up with a lawsuit that places the law you don’t like in front of a judge, in a case where you and the plaintiff want the same thing: for the judge to strike down the law.
In the Minnesota MOMS Case, the interest group was an outfit called Gender Justice.
Step Two: Make sure the judge wants to get rid of the law, too. This step is the responsibility of the interest group, not the governor. They must identify a judge who will definitely be looking for an excuse to strike down the law, then find an excuse to sue in that judge’s court. If you can’t pick a specific judge, you pick a county or district with a lot of judges appointed by the governor’s party and roll the dice on getting one of the judges you want. (One of the few weak points in the Imperial Repeal process is that you can lose the dice roll.)
Progressives are familiar with this step thanks to the current right-wing legal strategy of always filing national lawsuits in Amarillo, Texas, where they are essentially guaranteed to be heard by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a very conservative judge who is very sympathetic to conservative litigants. (For example, Kacsmaryk recently struck down the FDA’s 2001 approval of the abortion pill.) This widely-used technique is called “forum shopping.” It is icky but, in most contexts, basically benign. When used in Imperial Repeal, however, it becomes considerably more dangerous.
In the Minnesota MOMS Case, Gender Justice brought suit in bright-blue Ramsey County District Court, and it wasn’t a surprise when the case went before the Hon. Thomas A. Gilligan, Jr, a 2014 DFL appointee who was “deeply influenced” by the “energy and activism” of anti-war socialist radical Harvey Goldberg, a man hailed by some as “the finest Marxist teacher of his time.”
Step Three: It is now the Attorney General’s job to defend the law, energetically and publicly… but, for Imperial Repeal to work, he has to do it badly. As badly as possible. Spare no expense, print off thousands of pages, charge lots of billable hours, but the final product of all that work needs to be a bad argument that nobody would believe. Part of the reason you need a sympathetic judge in the case is so that the judge won’t call you out on the terrible job you are doing.
In the Minnesota MOMS Case, the pro-life laws in question were enacted specifically to discourage abortion. Gov. Walz’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, however, defended the laws by arguing that they were constitutional only insofar as they failed at discouraging abortion. Ellison argued that Gender Justice had not presented sufficient evidence that the statutes successfully discouraged abortion. When Gender Justice provided arguments that, yes, laws intended to discourage abortion successfully discouraged abortion, Ellison lost. Simple as that.
Ellison made virtually no effort to defend the abortion laws on the merits. For example, Ellison presented no evidence showing that there are benefits to having parents involved in the abortion decision of their own child. Gender Justice argued that teens—who, I remind you, can’t drive or own a gun without explicit parental permission—are capable of choosing abortion without even saying a word to Mom and Dad. Therefore, Gender Justice concluded, parental notification requirements unconstitutionally infringe on teen rights. Ellison’s office didn’t even respond with, “Hey, you know, teens have occasionally been known to make dumb, rash decisions, so slow your roll and let’s see how parents might be able to help.” He just accepted Gender Justice’s claim at face value!
Ellison’s office certainly did spend many hours and hundreds of thousands of (taxpayer) dollars “defending” this case. The docket, which is nightmarish to read through,7 contains heaps of motions and memoranda that nitpick around the edges of Gender Justice’s case. That’s crucial: the appearance of a vigorous defense is essential to success in Step Four.
Some of the nitpicking kinda worked; Ellison was able to get one of the plaintiffs dismissed (although this had no significant impact on the final outcome). But, when Judge Gilligan punched through the morass to consider the merits of Minnesota’s abortion laws, Ellison did nothing meaningful to oppose Gender Justice’s claims.
As a result, when Judge Gilligan handed down his decision striking down the laws, many passages mentioned some broad claim made by Gender Justice, followed by words to the effect that Attorney General Ellison had not offered any evidence rebutting the claim. Anyone versed in abortion law knows that ample evidence was available; Ellison had simply chosen not to present it. Because Ellison did not contest the evidence, Gilligan was forced to accept Gender Justice’s claims on a wide range of issues. He ruled accordingly.
Step Four: Work overtime to prevent anyone else from defending the law.
Lots of people recognized, at various stages of the Minnesota MOMS Case, that Attorney General Ellison either would do a bad job, was doing a bad job, or had done a bad job:
Pro-Life Action Ministries
The Association for Government Accountability
The Minnesota Senate
Traverse County Attorney Matthew Franzese
the titular Mothers Offering Maternal Support (MOMS), a group of concerned mothers formed in response to this lawsuit in order to defend their parental rights
All of these organizations actually supported Minnesota’s abortion laws, and would have offered a vigorous defense of them. The moment Ellison’s half-assed defense of the law was threatened, both Gender Justice and Ellison turned around and fought like wounded tigers to prevent those interventions. If Ellison had defended the law with half the ferocity he showed trying to reject people who wanted to help him defend the law, Ellison would have won this case.
Instead, he succeeded in blocking all of them. That meant the only defense of Minnesota’s abortion laws in Judge Gilligan’s court would be made by Attorney General Ellison, who wanted the laws repealed.
Step Five: Abandon the case as soon as you lose (because you wanted to lose).
Ordinarily, if a state loses a court case regarding the constitutionality of one of its own laws (especially a bipartisan law) the state appeals. District court judges often make mistakes; that’s what appeals courts are for.
However, the last thing you want in an Imperial Repeal is another bite at the apple. An appeals court might not be as sympathetic as the district court. An appeals court might even overcome the deliberately bad arguments made by the attorney general and uphold the law as written! So don’t give them a chance: don’t appeal. When someone asks why you’re not appealing to vindicate the rights of the Legislature and the voters, say that you’re abandoning the case to “save the state money,” since, after all, you ran up those huge legal bills on nitpicking in the first round!
This failure to appeal allows the single opinion of a single district judge in one county to suddenly and irrevocably become the law of the entire state. Legislatures can’t override it and other interested parties can’t contest it (see Step Four). Although district court orders should normally bind only within that district, Ellison claims that, by its consent, the State is bound to the decision statewide. A single minor judge ordered that the law can never be enforced again, anywhere in the state, the state accepts this, and that’s the ballgame.
Congratulations! You, the Governor of Minnesota (or any other state, for that matter), have just taken a validly-enacted law passed by our democratically-elected representatives and rendered it unenforceable in a way that nobody—not even your successors—can effectively gainsay. All it took was a sympathetic interest group, a single reasonably cooperative judge, and a few years of legal nitpicking. Imperial Repeal: a lot easier than actually convincing legislators who disagree with you to vote for your proposal!
Naturally, nobody is allowed to talk about this, even though it’s obvious to everyone with eyeballs. The parties to the case have to pretend that Keith Ellison is doing his job to the best of his abilities. The appeals-court judges have to pretend that the lower-court judge was acting neutrally, without acknowledging the impact of forum-shopping. The press isn’t allowed to accuse government officials willy-nilly of acting in bad faith unless they’re indicted or conservative. The result is a legal kabuki dance where everybody knows that the governor is rigging the system to repeal a law he doesn’t like without the vote of the legislature, but nobody says so. It does not make for fun reading.
General Applications
You can see why this novel gubernatorial power might be a problem for our constitutional system of government. Governors are not supposed to be able to delete laws they don’t like on their own initiative.
Although Imperial Repeal is a relatively new technique, which is still being refined, we’ve already observed it on several other occasions, most notoriously in the 2020 election.
I have consistently argued that Biden won the 2020 election, but election skeptics are right about one thing: thousands of votes were cast and counted that, according to the law, should not have been cast or counted, under judicial orders that never should have been issued. For example, here in Minnesota, we saw something very similar to the MOMS case play out:
Gov. Walz wanted to suspend certain election-integrity laws due to the ongoing epidemic. However, Walz did not have the support of the legislature. So, instead, his administration waited for (maybe nudged, who knows) an interest group to sue the state, demanding the suspension of those same election-integrity laws. (The group in that case was the Minnesota Alliance for Retired Americans Educational Fund.) After making a minimal show of defending Minnesota law, Walz’s government conceded everything and entered a consent decree which required, you guessed it, the suspension of all those election-integrity laws.
Fortunately, in Minnesota, this effort at Imperial Repeal was blocked. Two presidential elector candidates sued in federal court. Minnesota’s Secretary of State, Steve Simon, vigorously tried to prevent them from intervening, but failed. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals suspended the consent decree, restoring Minnesota’s election-integrity laws just in time for Election Day.
Other states weren’t so lucky. In particular, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court suspended a number of election-integrity laws in the pivotal battleground, after preventing anyone but the Democratic Secretary of State from “defending” them, and a deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court failed to reverse them. Imperial Repeal succeeded.8
These are all examples of Democrats exercising Imperial Repeal. However, the tools themselves are non-partisan. There’s nothing preventing Republicans from pulling the same trick. If Imperial Repeal becomes an accepted fixture in our law, they will have no choice. It is entirely possible that Republicans are already exercising Imperial Repeal somewhere, and I’ve simply missed it, because I live in a blue state.
The Special Absurdity of the MOMS Case
The MOMS case offers some interesting new refinements in the technique.
When Judge Gilligan handed down his order abolishing the parental notification requirement (among other laws), a number of Minnesota parents became aware for the first time of what a bad job Attorney General Ellison had done representing their interests. They had previously assumed (not unreasonably?) that the top lawyer in their state would make the best possible legal arguments for the laws of the state, whether he agreed with them or not. Their first inkling otherwise came when newspapers reported that Gilligan’s order had noted Ellison’s failure to rebut tons of evidence presented by Gender Justice. Their second inkling came when Ellison announced that he wasn’t appealing the decision.
These moms had now lost an important legal right—the right to know when their daughters get abortions, in order to help counsel them and monitor for potential complications—due to Ellison’s malignant incompetence, something they hadn’t known about before. They therefore swiftly organized to form the organization MOMS, which sought to enter the case and fix the many deficiencies in Ellison’s defense. They hired an attorney and gathered testimony from twelve expert witnesses to rebut the erroneous factual claims made by Gender Justice, claims on which Judge Gilligan had relied… claims which Attorney General Ellison undoubtedly would have rebutted all by himself, if he hadn’t been trying to throw the case.
Then, a twist: a few months after Imperial Repeal succeeded in striking down all of Minnesota’s pro-life laws, much of the lawsuit became moot: in the 2022 midterms, Democrats won the Minnesota Senate by one seat, thanks to just a few dozen votes in one district.9 At long last, Democrats had the clout to do what they’d always wanted to do in the first place. They soon voted to legislatively repeal all Minnesota’s abortion laws… except the parental notification law, where just one or two Democrats were reluctant to pull the trigger. This repeal limited the MOMS case to just the question of the parental consent law.
MOMS is now the last party standing. Everyone else who wanted to defend the law has already been excluded. If they get knocked out of the case, too, it’s over. Imperial Repeal wins. Gender Justice and Keith Ellison have once again joined forces to argue that MOMS should be prevented from entering the case, but with an added sweetener:
It is now the official position of the Attorney General of Minnesota that MOMS cannot join the case because they joined it too late. He says they should have formed the group and joined the case way back at the start, in 2019. He argues that MOMS was aware of the case, their parental interests, and Attorney General Ellison’s (deliberately ineffectual) litigation strategy because some MOMS members had seen a newspaper headline mentioning the case back when it was filed.
Here’s a typical story about the case from that time. This story mentions the potential loss of parental rights in the 11th paragraph, out of 12. It doesn’t report that possibility as a fact, but rather as a claim by a partisan spokesperson. Papers that year did not report what a bad job General Ellison was doing.
Nonetheless, General Ellison insists, every Minnesota mother, upon reading that CBS News story, should have dropped whatever she was doing, tracked down the case docket (how?), read it carefully (this is very hard),10 continued to follow the case over the course of months of development, and somehow recognized, in hundreds and hundreds of pages of (largely irrelevant) legalese, the moments where General Ellison totally dropped the ball. If Minnesota’s moms didn’t do all that, well, then, it’s their own fault for not vindicating their rights when they had the chance!
MOMS ably shows in their filings that this position is (1) stupid, and (2) more importantly, unsupported by Minnesota or federal precedent. Judge Gilligan accepted it anyway.
He accepted several other rather silly arguments, too. For example, Judge Gilligan ruled that mothers’ acknowledged fundamental right to raise their daughters as they see fit is not enough to give them a legal right to intervene in a case eliminating a validly-enacted law that gave mothers a particular say in raising their daughters as they see fit. Moreover, the case is pockmarked with legal presumptions that obviously aren’t true in this case (like the presumption that the Attorney General has the best interests of every Minnesotan at heart) but which must still be rebutted by evidence—evidence Judge Gilligan has shown himself unwilling to accept.
MOMS is now on appeal to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. That’s a separate docket, and the documents don’t even seem to be online,11 although I have posted the main appeals briefs (which are public documents) for your perusal. Oral arguments were on November 15 and can be heard here. If I were betting on this case, my bet would be that MOMS loses and the case ends (odds 70%). That’s not because they deserve to lose under Minnesota law. It’s because the executive branch has very cleverly manipulated the rules to allow it to repeal laws without legislative involvement, and it has raised many small but meaningful legal hurdles to anyone who might try to stop them. We saw Donald Trump adopt a similar strategy in the Minnesota Disqualification Suit, and it worked there, too.
However, if it works this time, expect the technique of Imperial Repeal to arrive soon at a governor’s mansion near you. Just imagine what a Republican governor could do with the ability to repeal individual gun laws, or certain taxes, or school curricula, or abortion-access laws, and you can see why the Minnesota MOMS case isn’t just a concern for Minnesota pro-lifers.
NEXT TIME: I definitely owe the pay-listers a Worthy Reads or a Short Review, so that’s up next. However, this month is Christmas, New Year’s, and my wedding anniversary, so please be patient with me.
I have not discussed the contents of this blog post with any of the people involved in the case, nor, to my recollection, have I ever discussed the posture or merits of the case with any of them, beyond abbreviated speculation on its outcome. I have requested (and received) case documents on occasion. The blog post represents my own view and not the views of anyone involved in the case.
Minnesota’s Iron Range was both very pro-life and very pro-union, which helped; they elected pro-life Democrat Jim Oberstar to Congress many times, until Obamacare turned the pro-lifers against him. I think it’s fair to say that Minnesota was the last redoubt for pro-life Democrats outside Louisiana.
The MNGOP last won a statewide election in 2006, but was fairly credible for a while after. The MNGOP did not give up on winning altogether until 2018, when it re-nominated Jeff Johnson for governor instead of accepting Tim Pawlenty’s bid. Johnson was a very attractive candidate, and I personally loved him, but he had already been resoundingly beaten in the previous cycle, and in a national red year, to boot. Tim Pawlenty was the last person to actually win a statewide election on the red ticket—and, thanks to the 2018 MNGOP’s decision, he still is!
The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is the Minnesota chapter of the Democratic Party. This is very convenient, because it means both parties have a three-letter acronym that can be preceded by a definite article: the GOP and the DFL. It makes writing about both scads easier. I strongly recommend that the national Democrats also merge with the Farmer-Labor Party, so that everyone in the United States can enjoy the ease of political writing that we Minnesotans have enjoyed for decades.
To those of you who discovered De Civitate recently, via my coverage of the Minnesota Disqualification Suit against Donald Trump: welcome. I’m delighted you’ve joined our little community.
However, since many of you who share my disdain for Donald Trump’s insurrection are more on the progressive end of the spectrum, I think I ought to give you fair warning: I believe it is the first and most basic responsibility of government to protect the lives of human beings under its jurisdiction who have not committed a crime. That duty of protection includes human children, which obviously includes unborn human children. (“Children” is the correct English term, as opposed to “fetuses,” “babies,” or “ZEFs.”) The only reasonable exception to this rule is when the death of the child is a tragic but necessary side effect of saving someone else’s life; for example, when chemotherapy is needed to save a mother’s life from cancer, but is likely to kill her unborn child.
Arguments that unborn human children somehow aren’t human beings (and can therefore be killed) are silly, easily dismantled, and—in my opinion—almost universally disingenuous. The argument that unborn children aren’t even alive is, rationally speaking, on par with believing the Sandy Hook massacre was faked by “crisis actors”… but forgivable because this argument is also disingenuous. In both cases, the bad arguments (it seems to me) are motivated mostly by fear of the practical consequences of recognizing that unborn human children have the same human rights as everybody else.
Those practical consequences could indeed be significant, sometimes horrifying. Nonetheless, it is wrong to kill a child, and it is the first duty of government to prevent the killing of children. We should, as a country, stop killing children on purpose. You, personally, should work to end the killing of these children. If you realize this, it changes everything about how you view our world. If you don’t realize this, that changes you, too, and not for the better.
I hope this revelation doesn’t drive you away from De Civ. In fact, I hope you come to favor human rights for the unborn. But now you can decide for yourself, instead of slowly realizing over the course of this and other articles that I’m one of those damned pro-lifers and unsubscribing without hearing an explanation.
There’s a really weird meme on the Left that Democrats actually don’t want abortion to be legal on demand at the fortieth week of pregnancy. This is false; look at the actual laws they try to pass, which make abortion legal on demand at any stage of pregnancy, including full term. (Remember that, under Doe v. Bolton, the word “health,” without further explanation, means anything an abortionist wants it to mean.) Heck, the Democratic Party still foursquare opposes the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003! They want to bring back the technique of partially birthing a viable child and then scrambling its brains halfway through the birth canal!
The fallback meme says that nobody gets late-term abortions except in cases of grave physical danger to the mother or fatal fetal genetic defect, but you can look around for yourself: there’s absolutely no evidence for this claim, there never has been, and all of the available evidence on third-trimester abortions (there isn’t much) suggests that people get third-trimester abortions for exactly the same reasons they get first- and second-trimester abortions—overwhelmingly because they don’t feel ready to have a baby, not because of health issues.
The second fallback meme says that there aren’t very many late-term abortions, so pro-lifers are making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s true that there are a lot fewer late-term abortions than early-term abortions, but we’re still talking 12,000 abortions performed after Week 21 every year, which… I mean, that’s a lot of dead viable children! A mountain of them, you might say!
I’d cite this footnote better if I weren’t adding it on my final editing pass. If you in the comments want to challenge any of what I just said, go for it, and I’ll come back with some more studies, but, seriously, I expect you to look for the evidence yourself first. Finding out for yourself that these memes are full of garbage is always a lot more convincing than having me demonstrate.
There’s no direct link to the docket. That would be too easy. You have to go to the Minnesota Court Records Online website, select Case Search, choose Search by Case Number, and enter “62-CV-19-3868.” That gives you access to a docket of hundreds upon hundreds of documents with utterly cryptic descriptions like, “Order-Other,” 46 separate documents all titled “Memorandum,” and zillions of poorly-flagged exhibits. Good luck in there!
There were not enough of these votes in Pennsylvania to reverse the final outcome, which is one reason why I’m still convinced that Biden won Pennsylvania. Democrats have not spent enough time thanking their lucky stars that it worked out that way, despite their own best efforts.
Minnesota Republicans ran a disingenuous, conspiracy-ridden moron named Scott Jensen, who not only lost the election, but brought such strong negative tailwinds headwinds with him the Republicans failed to win back the Minnesota House, lost the Minnesota Senate, and lost the closest statewide election in decades for Attorney General, where talented newcomer Jim Schultz could not quite overcome Jensen’s intense tailwinds headwinds.
EDIT: 4 December 6:13 PM: Someday I will remember the difference between a tailwind and a headwind, but today is not that day!
I’ll repeat what I said several footnotes ago: There’s no direct link to the docket. That would be too easy. You have to go to the Minnesota Court Records Online website, select Case Search, choose Search by Case Number, and enter “62-CV-19-3868.” That gives you access to a docket of hundreds upon hundreds of documents with utterly cryptic descriptions like, “Order-Other,” 46 separate documents all titled “Memorandum,” and zillions of poorly-flagged exhibits.
Minnesota has unusually great public records systems, including a State Revisor’s Office that is second to none… but the docket for this case is something Kafka would build as a torment for the suffering souls in Purgatory.
This post was a surprise--given how you've previously written about the question of whether the disqualification clause applies to the president, I was expecting your next article to be about the Colorado lawsuit.
My ignorance is showing here… but this series of events confuses me when comparing them to everything that happened in the Trump Disqualification case. In THAT case, interested parties joined in the defense to make sure the defense was ‘of quality’ and essentially joined in on getting sued. I was confused by why someone would do that and you had assured me that it might sound odd but that it does serve a purpose in certain instances. Jump cut to THIS case and it seems like that exact same thing was happening but they weren’t allowed to join in on the defense?
In your detailed breakdown of the MOMS group at the end it kind of seems like they didn’t try to join until after the case was already decided (which does make me feel like that specific group is correct to be declined the ability to join a contest that has already concluded) but you also reference other groups who tried to join but weren’t allowed to for <other reasons>?
So what’s the deal? Presumably the same underlying political currents that wanted this law to be nullified also wanted Trump disqualified formally from presidential eligibility.