The US Supreme Court said Donald Trump can appear on presidential ballots this year, putting an end to efforts nationwide to ban him under a rarely used constitutional provision barring insurrectionists from holding office.
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The court on Monday unanimously overturned a Colorado Supreme Court decision that said Trump forfeited his right to run for president again by trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. The high court acted a day before Super Tuesday, when Colorado and 14 other states and one territory hold presidential primaries.
In an unsigned 13-page opinion the court said that Congress has exclusive power to enforce the provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, against people seeking federal office. “States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency,” the court said.
A state official in Maine and a judge in Illinois had also declared Trump ineligible to appear on the ballot, and litigation was taking place in other states as well. The high court ruling effectively dooms those efforts.
Though the court was unanimous, the justices split along ideological lines in their rationale. The three liberals – Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said the court went further than it needed to in its reasoning. In a concurring opinion that read more like a dissent, they faulted what they called “the majority” for indicating the insurrection clause can’t be enforced without Congress first enacting legislation.
The court “reaches out to decide Section 3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision,” the group wrote. “In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.”
The decision spares the Republican frontrunner from having to fight state-by-state battles over his eligibility to even be listed as a candidate. It resolves key questions about a post-Civil War constitutional clause that had threatened to derail Trump’s bid to reclaim the White House and fueled the debate over his culpability for the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.
The ruling didn’t explicitly say whether Congress could refuse to count Trump’s electoral votes should he win at the polls in November. The high court declined to absolve Trump of blame for the events of Jan. 6, sidestepping his contention that he didn’t engage in insurrection.
The ruling was perhaps the court’s biggest presidential election decision since the 5-4 Bush v. Gore case ended the 2000 deadlock and dealt a blow to the court’s reputation.
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