The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that former President Donald Trump can remain on Colorado’s presidential primary ballot, reversing an extraordinary state court ruling that had deemed him ineligible to run for the presidency and preventing future attempts by states to remove him from their ballots.
The decision, which came one day ahead of a slate of Super Tuesday primary elections from coast to coast, further cements Trump’s path to the Republican presidential nomination.
In an unsigned, 13-page majority opinion, the high court said that Congress, rather than the states, carries the responsibility of enforcing a constitutional provision that bars insurrectionists from returning to office. Four justices signed opinions concurring in the judgment but questioning whether enforcement of the provision should be confined to Congress.
On the fundamental question of whether Trump would be removed from Colorado’s ballot, the court ruled 9 to 0.
Shortly after the release of the decision, Trump wrote on social media: “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!”
The ballot case had placed the conservative Supreme Court in an unprecedented and uncomfortable position: Forced to rule on an argument — viewed by some leading legal scholars as strong — that concludes Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack disqualifies him from serving as president and renders him ineligible for the ballot.
Colorado’s top court was convinced by the argument, finding in a 4-to-3 December decision that Trump’s connection to the Jan. 6 mayhem amounted to engagement in insurrection that prevents him from holding or running for the office of president again.
The Colorado ruling was built on Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a provision enacted after the Civil War that bars officeholders who have taken an oath of office to uphold the Constitution from returning to office if they have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion.”
After the Colorado court ejected Trump from the state’s ballot, the move was repeated by Maine’s secretary of state for the ballot in the northern New England state, and by a circuit court judge in Illinois for the ballot in the deep-blue Land of Lincoln.
Judges and election officials in other states, including some Democratic strongholds such as New York, went the other way, leaving Trump on their ballots. To some, the idea of removing him from the ballot has seemed bizarre and antidemocratic, whatever the legal arguments.
The Supreme Court said in its unsigned majority opinion, “States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office.”
“But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency,” said the opinion, adding: “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.”
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-to-3 conservative supermajority after key Trump appointments, has been viewed by the public as increasingly partisan as it has issued polarizing decisions ending the right to abortion and banning affirmative action in college admissions.
But in the ballot case, the court took pains to downplay its partisan divides. “All nine Members of the Court agree,” the majority opinion emphasized, referring to the outcome. “Our colleagues writing separately further agree with many of the reasons this opinion provides for reaching it.”
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed a solo concurring opinion saying that she agreed that states lack the power to enforce Section 3 against a candidate for the presidency, but that she would not go so far as to say that Section 3 can only be applied through federal legislation.
“This suit was brought by Colorado voters under state law in state court,” she wrote. “It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.”
Barrett’s position would not strip the federal courts of the power to enforce Section 3.
Still, she downplayed her disagreement with the majority, urging Americans to take from the decision the message that “our differences are far less important than our unanimity.”
The court’s three liberals — Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor — signed on to a separate opinion concurring with the judgment but echoing Barrett’s point in more strident language.
They wrote that the majority had decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate” themselves and Trump from “future controversy.”
“We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment,” the liberals wrote.
The court moved swiftly to produce the opinions in the case, Trump v. Anderson.
On Jan. 5, the court agreed to hear an appeal of the decision handed down in Colorado. In doing so, the court took on perhaps its most explosive election case since Bush v. Gore, the 5-to-4 ruling that effectively handed the White House to George W. Bush by halting a Florida recount in the 2000 election.
A ruling by the Supreme Court pushing Trump from the ballot could have set off an incendiary reaction from his fervent supporters, a reality that may have weighed on the court, which has three appointees of the former president but has sometimes ruled against him.
The case was sapped of much of its drama at oral arguments when members of the court’s liberal bloc voiced skepticism at the case for removing Trump from the ballot. Their remarks left little question about the direction of the case.
Addressing a lawyer for Colorado voters opposed to Trump’s eligibility, the liberal Kagan said: “I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”
“Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens, but for the rest of the nation?” she wondered aloud on Feb. 8.
New Yorkers are due to vote in the Republican presidential primary on April 2. Trump has been dominating this GOP election cycle, marching toward an expected general election rematch with President Biden, who trails Trump in the polls.
