Today, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Donald Trump can stay on the 2024 presidential ballot, overturning a 4-to-3 ruling by the all-Democrat Colorado Supreme Court that said Trump is ineligible to run for the presidency.
The Justices agreed that the “responsibility for enforcing” the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause “against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.”
They ruled that “the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, on its face, does not affirmatively delegate such a power to the States.”
If states were allowed to determine which candidates were eligible for the ballot, it could result in a candidate being “declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct,” the Court said in its per curiam opinion. “The disruption would be all the more acute” if a candidate were found ineligible after people had voted in the election, it added. “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.”
The Court’s ruling rejected the reasoning of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling in December that found Trump ineligible for the ballot based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which contains a clause barring people who “engaged insurrection” from holding office. The Colorado Supreme Court claimed Trump engaged in insurrection through his alleged involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged incitement of the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A majority of the justices seemed likely to rule in Trump’s favor last month after many of them appeared skeptical of arguments for booting Trump from the ballot.
The three progressive justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – agreed with the majority’s judgment but argued it contained too many alternative reasons for its decision. Their concurrence began with a quote from Chief Justice Robert’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion case Roe v. Wade. “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” Justice Roberts wrote in his concurring opinion in that case, chiding his more conservative colleagues for declaring there is no right to an abortion at all, rather than just saying that the 15-week limit on abortion before them was an acceptable limit on abortion rights.
Allowing Colorado to kick Trump off the ballot, “would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles,” the three progressive justices conceded. But they disagreed with additional reasons for overturning the Colorado Supreme Court contained in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, which they saw as too broad and likely to “insulate this Court and [Trump] from future controversy.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion joined by no other justice, saying that the court only needed to determine whether states lack the power to enforce the insurrection clause. “It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced,” she said. “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home,” she added.
The Supreme Court’s decision also overrules decisions in Illinois and Maine that had found Trump ineligible. All state rulings on the matter had been put on hold until the Supreme Court issued a decision in the Colorado case, so voters were not actually prevented from casting a ballot for Trump by those other court and administrative rulings.
