The Supreme Court agreed 9-0 that Trump could appear on the ballot for the primary and general election in Colorado. This is a huge loss to Democrats, who have attempted to undermine Trump in every possible way to prevent a potential defeat in November.
The Supreme Court rightly noted that Congress alone could decide who qualified as an insurrectionist for the purpose of the Amendment. Otherwise, rogue state ideologues or a weaponized Department of Justice would be able to eliminate political opponents, as opposed to a broad national consensus. SCOTUS Blog says:
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states cannot disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices held that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy, against candidates for federal offices.
All nine justices agreed that Colorado cannot remove Trump from the ballot. But four justices – Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a separate opinion and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a joint opinion – argued that their colleagues should have stopped there and not decided anything more.
States deciding for themselves who qualifies as an “insurrectionist” is itself contrary to the spirit of the 14th Amendment. Former Confederate states could have held that Unionists and Black Americans were “insurrectionists,” and disqualify them from the ballot in 1868. If each state gets to decide who can appear on a federal ballot, any semblance of democracy would be gone and the Union would be gravely imperilled. The Hill continues:
“State-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that the President … represents all the voters in the Nation,” the court added.
Colorado’s presidential primary is on Tuesday, and Trump had been allowed to appear on the ballot while the case was pending. As of midnight on Monday, about 500,000 ballots had been cast in the Republican primary, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview.
Trump is not out of the fire yet, as he has to overcome the many cases against him. The New York judgement against him, in particular, could knock the winds out of his sails when it comes to funding the campaign. However, continued baseless attacks against him tend to fire up his base and expose Democrats as ruthless authoritarians.
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