Strap in! This is just the beginning. The Supremes aren't going to let a bunch of shyster lawyers running interference for the DNC decide our election.
If this is a surprise to you I suggest you stop drinking the spiked Kool-Aide.
Supreme Court Restores Donald Trump’s Ballot Eligibility
Justices reverse Colorado ruling that disqualified Trump for role in Capitol attack
By Jess Bravin, WSJ
Updated March 4, 2024
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that states lack the power to reject presidential candidates on the grounds they engaged in rebellion or insurrection against the U.S., a decision that restored former President Donald Trump’s name to Colorado’s ballot and ended similar challenges to his candidacy elsewhere.
The unsigned opinion puts to rest a series of state-level claims that Trump isn’t eligible to be president a second time under a long dormant constitutional provision barring former officials who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office again.
“The Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the court said, referring to the disqualification provision, which is part of the 14th Amendment.
Allowing state-by-state determinations of a presidential candidate’s eligibility could lead to a chaotic patchwork of outcomes that would disrupt a national election, the court said.
“The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct,” the court said.
While all nine justices agreed that Trump should appear on the ballot, four of them in separate opinions said the majority had gone too far in limiting ways to enforce the insurrection clause. The court’s three liberal members were pointed in their criticism, suggesting the majority had unnecessarily insulated Trump “from future controversy.”
Former President Donald Trump spoke at Mar-a-Lago on Monday.
That prompted Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who also didn’t embrace all of the decision, to emphasize that the court had come together on the bottom-line outcome. “That is the message Americans should take home,” she wrote.
Trump, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, praised Monday’s decision as historic, “something that will be spoken about 100 years from now and 200 years from now.” Voters can eliminate candidates “very quickly, but a [state] court shouldn’t be doing that and the Supreme Court saw that very well,” Trump said.
The group behind the Colorado challenge, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that Trump won on technical grounds. “It will be up to the American people to ensure accountability,” said CREW President Noah Bookbinder.
The lawsuit, on behalf of a group of Republican and independent voters in Colorado, claimed Trump was disqualified for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters aiming to prevent congressional certification of President Biden’s 2020 election victory. Colorado’s highest court agreed in a December decision.
Monday’s ruling reversing the Colorado court was but the first installment in a set of Trump-related cases before the Supreme Court. Last week, the justices scheduled oral argument in April over Trump’s claim that he cannot be prosecuted for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. It is also considering whether an obstruction charge filed against Jan. 6 rioters as well as Trump can be applied to the Capitol attack.
The disqualification push against Trump was embraced by an ideological mix of legal scholars and Trump opponents. It relied on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War and added several of the Union’s objectives to the Constitution. Among them was barring disloyal officeholders from returning to power. Congress granted a reprieve to most ex-Confederates in 1872, leaving little precedent on how the restriction should be applied.
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with several offenses including conspiring to defraud the U.S.
In addition to Colorado, Maine’s secretary of state had barred Trump from the ballot there and a state judge in Illinois recently found that Trump should be disqualified, overruling the state elections board. A series of challenges have been working their way through other states. Some officials and judges had declined to deem Trump, the Republican front-runner, ineligible, saying it wasn’t their place to decide.
The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t opine on whether Trump engaged in insurrection. Instead it focused on who gets to make that call.
“The notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible,” the court said.
Still, the court said that states may disqualify individuals from state offices for insurrection, something New Mexico already has done in stripping office from a county commissioner who participated in the Jan. 6 attack.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh formed the majority for the full opinion.
The court splintered once the majority indicated it believed Congress would need to pass legislation to specify procedures for enforcing Section 3.
Three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson—said the decision didn’t need to go that far and that such reasoning foreclosed other avenues of federal enforcement, including by federal judges.
“Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President,” the liberals wrote.
Barrett, in her own concurrence, noted the court was resolving “a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election” and said now was “not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”
“Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up,” she wrote.
Trump has been charged with multiple federal and state felonies over his effort to keep power after losing the 2020 election, but he hasn’t been indicted on the specific federal crime of insurrection, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years and an automatic ban on holding federal office.
The former president is facing four criminal indictments, including in a federal case in Washington, D.C., that focuses on his actions after voters went to the polls. Special counsel Jack Smith charged him with several offenses, including that he conspired to defraud the U.S. and interfere with the rights of voters.
It isn’t clear when—or whether—that case might go to trial. The Supreme Court is expected to rule before July on Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution.
Later in March, Trump is scheduled for trial in New York on state felony charges of falsifying business records to cover up hush money paid to a porn star ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The former president denies wrongdoing across the board. In the Colorado ballot litigation, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case on an expedited schedule.
Even before the pro-Trump mob’s Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol had ended, some, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah), were calling the attack an insurrection, and scholars of the 14th Amendment began debating the pertinence of the Section 3 disqualification requirement.
The effort to apply the provision to Trump gained wider credibility last August, after William Baude and Michael Paulsen, two law professors respected in conservative circles, published a scholarly article arguing that Section 3 applied to Trump’s actions to stop the transfer of power and that state officials could enforce the stricture without explicit authorization from Congress.
After a five-day trial in Denver, a state district court found that Trump had incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, but she ruled that Section 3 didn’t apply to the presidency.
Both the voters and Trump appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 for the voters, finding that Trump engaged in insurrection and that it would be absurd to apply the disqualification to every officeholder except the most powerful one of all, the president.
Norma Anderson, the lead plaintiff and a former Republican majority leader of the Colorado Senate, said before Monday’s Supreme Court decision that whatever the result, she believed the suit had to be filed.
“You have to understand, I have lived through presidents since FDR on up,” the 91-year-old Anderson said. “Not one of them would behave as Donald Trump did.”
Write to Jess Bravin at Jess.Bravin@wsj.com
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