A cartoon by Pedro Molina.
Ann E. Marimow The Washington PostKeeps Trump on ballot, rejects Colorado voter challenge, ignoring insurrection; Liberal justices accuse conservative majority of going further than needed.
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously sided with Donald Trump, allowing the former president to remain on the election ballot and reversing a Colorado ruling that disqualified him from returning to office because of his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The justices said the Constitution does not permit a single state to disqualify a presidential candidate from national office, declaring that such responsibility “rests with Congress and not the states.” The court warned of disruption and chaos if a candidate for nationwide office could be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct.
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration,” the court said in an unsigned, 13-page opinion.
While the decision was unanimous, the court’s three liberal justices also wrote separately, saying the conservative majority went further than necessary in the ruling and decided an issue that was not before the court in an attempt to insulate itself and Trump from “future controversy.”
The court’s decision to keep Trump on the ballot leaves him as the leading candidate for the Republican nomination and for now removes the Supreme Court from directly determining the path of the 2024 presidential election. The justices fast-tracked the challenge from voters in Colorado and issued their decision one day before Super Tuesday, when that state and more than a dozen others hold nominating contests. The ruling applies to other states with similar challenges to Trump’s candidacy.
In a sign of the high court’s awareness of the election calendar, the justices took the unusual step of announcing the opinion on the Supreme Court’s website on a day when the court is not in session, instead of issuing it from the bench later this month.
Trump reacted to the decision with a brief, all-caps message on his social media site. “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” he wrote.
Trump’s eligibility to return to office is not the only question before the justices that could affect the electability of the former president, who is facing four criminal indictments, two of them related to his efforts to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The Supreme Court next month will hear Trump’s challenge to a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that said he is not protected from criminal prosecution by presidential immunity. The justices’ decision to take that case delayed Trump’s D.C. federal trial for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election results until at least late summer, just a few months before the general election.
The justices separately have agreed to review the validity of a law that was used to charge hundreds of people in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and is also a key element of Trump’s four-count federal election obstruction case in Washington.
Trump is the first former U.S. president ever charged with a crime. The high court’s involvement in his legal and political future as he campaigns to return to the White House has made the 2024 election an unprecedented test of America’s judicial and democratic institutions.
In the Colorado case, the justices were reviewing a decision from Colorado’s top court that relied on a long-dormant post-Civil War provision of the 14th Amendment to declare Trump ineligible to return to the White House. The case thrust the Supreme Court into a pivotal role not seen since 2000, when the high court’s decision in Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush and bitterly divided the nation.
The provision prohibits anyone who previously pledged to support the Constitution as “an officer of the United States” from returning to office if they betrayed their oath by engaging in insurrection. The text of Section 3 does not specify who is supposed to enforce the clause or when it should be invoked.
As part of the court’s opinion Monday, five of the six conservative justices said Section 3 must be enforced through federal legislation, a stance that legal analysts said would presumably prevent Congress from trying to enforce the statute by refusing to count Trump electoral votes at the Jan. 6, 2025, joint session to certify the election results.
The three liberal justices, in their sharply worded concurrence, said that approach “shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement.”
“We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily,” wrote Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, agreed with the liberals in part, writing separately to say that the lawsuit before the court “did not require us to address the complicated question of whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.”
But she also appeared to chide the liberals for the tone of their concurrence, saying this political moment was not a time to “amplify disagreement with stridency.”
“The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up,” Barrett wrote.
The challenge to Trump’s candidacy was brought by six Colorado voters — four Republicans and two independents. The Colorado Supreme Court found Trump engaged in insurrection when he summoned his supporters to Washington and encouraged an angry crowd to disrupt Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory.
At oral argument on Feb. 8, justices from across the ideological spectrum warned of troubling political ramifications if they permitted Colorado’s top court to order the leading Republican presidential candidate off the ballot. Several justices suggested that allowing the state court ruling to bar Trump from federal office would throw the presidential race into turmoil and lead other states to try to disqualify Democratic candidates.
The justices did not spend much time on the question of whether Trump engaged in insurrection. Instead, much of the discussion focused on differing interpretations of the text and history of the 14th Amendment provision, also known as the disqualification clause.
Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, told the court that enforcement of the disqualification clause is up to Congress, not state courts or officials. In addition, Mitchell said Section 3 does not apply to Trump because the president is not an “officer of the United States,” which is one of the terms the section uses when discussing potential insurrectionists.
Jason Murray, the lawyer for the Colorado voters, urged the justices to definitively resolve the question of Trump’s eligibility. He warned that if they did not do so, Congress could still try to disqualify Trump and prevent him from taking office if he wins the general election.
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