Could Donald Trump’s rambling, off-the-cuff statements cost Alabama big?
Colorado’s attorney general filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday, asking a judge to block Trump’s decision to move Space Command from that state to Huntsville, and he cited Trump’s comments during the announcement—decrying the state’s use of mail-in voting—to support the state’s claims.
The lawsuit alleges that the decision was politically motivated, unconstitutional and exceeds the authority of the president.
“President Trump’s decision to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to punish the State of Colorado for allowing eligible voters to vote by mail is unconstitutional,” the lawsuit reads. “When issuing his decision, the President could not have been clearer about his motivations, announcing that ‘[t]he problem I have with Colorado’ is that ‘they do mail-in voting’ and that this ‘played a big factor’ in the decision.
“The Constitution does not permit the Executive to punish or retaliate against States for lawfully exercising sovereign powers reserved for the States, as President Trump and the Executive Branch have unlawfully done here.”
Trump’s comments about mail-in voting caught nearly everyone by surprise, particularly because numerous independent studies and reviews conducted by the military of the two potential sites for Space Command—Colorado Springs and Huntsville—had all found Huntsville to be the best location.
Despite having facts on his side, though, Trump decided to inject politics into the ordeal.
“The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems—they do mail-in voting,” Trump said during the press conference on Sept. 2. “They went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections, and we can’t have that. When a State is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections because that’s what that means.”
There has been zero evidence that mail-in voting produces more fraud, and several studies have found that it actually lowers fraud rates.
Colorado’s lawsuit names a number of defendants, including the Department of Defense and Air Force, and it claims that Trump violated the Tenth Amendment and that the DOD failed to properly execute the move. It also claims the move would cost thousands of jobs, billions of dollars and be an ultimate waste of taxpayers’ money.
The September decision by Trump appeared to finally bring to an end a six-year tug of war over the newly created department. Trump initially awarded the location to Huntsville during his first term as president. That decision was later reversed by President Joe Biden, who cited concerns over Alabama’s health care laws—specifically its draconian abortion ban—as a reason to move the headquarters to Colorado Springs.
Along the way, though, the potential location for the new department was studied repeatedly by the military, with every possible factor weighed. Even after SPACECOM was operating in Colorado, the studies showed that Huntsville was a better fit, both in terms of operations and costs.
