The U.S. Supreme Court gave former President Donald Trump a major victory on Monday, ruling that he cannot be disqualified from Colorado’s Republican primary ballot under the 14th Amendment.
The historic ruling derails a broad effort to keep Trump from even qualifying for the 2024 presidential election, one that sought to hold him accountable for inspiring his MAGA supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bald-faced attempt to remain in the White House after losing that election.
The highest court in the land issued its decision per curiam, meaning that all nine justices agreed on a basic premise: Allowing a state to unilaterally take this kind of sweeping action would create chaos. Instead, they concluded, this kind of forceful act citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should come at the federal level.
“Permitting state enforcement of Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates would raise serious questions about the scope of that power,” they wrote in an unsigned opinion.
The justices all expressed a serious concern with the fallout of what they called a “patchwork” approach, one that could fuel partisan hack jobs against enemy candidates and destroy the orderliness of the current presidential primary system across the nation.
“The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record),” they wrote.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined together in a separate concurrence to clarify why they thought this latest effort could cause harm.
“In this case, the court must decide whether Colorado may keep a presidential candidate off the ballot on the ground that he is an oathbreaking insurrectionist and thus disqualified from holding federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Allowing Colorado to do so would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles,” the trio wrote.
The court over the weekend indicated that one case would be decided Monday, taking the unusual decision of issuing an opinion on a day when the court isn’t in session. Rulings are usually issued from the bench, with summaries of their opinions read in the courtroom. The next court day is not scheduled to take place until March 15.
The ruling—which reverses a decision from the Colorado Supreme Court— comes the day before the Super Tuesday primaries which include Colorado. In a historic decision, the Colorado Supreme Court in December ruled that Trump was not eligible to be a candidate in the state’s Republican primary because he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War, any “officer of the United States” who has sworn an oath to support the Constitution who is then found to have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” is barred from holding public office. The 4-3 ruling from the Colorado court was the first time in U.S. history that the constitutional provision had been used as a means of disqualifying a presidential candidate.
Maine and Illinois similarly barred Trump from their primary ballots following similar legal challenges to his candidacy. All of the rulings were placed on hold while Trump appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, which in turn fast-tracked the case.
The high court’s justices were widely expected to rule in Trump’s favor based on questioning during oral arguments in the case last month. Conservative and liberal justices alike expressed concerns about individual states having the ability to disqualify candidates in national elections, with little of the discussion actually pertaining to the Jan. 6 riot or the role that Trump played in its instigation.
Last week, the Supreme Court separately agreed to hear arguments in April concerning whether or not Trump can be prosecuted on election interference charges. Trump claims that he is immune for actions that he took as president, and his lawyers have sought to delay a trial on the charges until after the election. The high court is expected to rule before the end of its term in late June or early July, possibly creating a situation in which the leading Republican presidential candidate will be on trial for election interference at the height of election season in November.
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