Supreme Court says Trump can stay on Colorado election ballot in 9-0 decision

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that former President Donald Trump can remain on Colorado’s presidential primary ballot, lifting an obstacle to his 2024 campaign and reversing an extraordinary state court ruling that had deemed him ineligible to run for the presidency.

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 unfit 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 Jan. 6 amounted to engagement in insurrection that prevents him from holding or running for 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 Trump from the ballot has seemed bizarre and antidemocratic, whatever the legal arguments.

On Jan. 5, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the decision handed down in Colorado. In doing so, the court took on 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 Trump’s supporters, a reality that may have weighed on the court, which has three appointees of the former president but has sometimes ruled against him.

Even members of the high court’s three-member liberal bloc voiced skepticism at oral arguments when presented with the case for removing Trump from the ballot. Justice Elena Kagan questioned why Colorado would have the power to deliver a decision that could ultimately sink a candidate’s entire national campaign.

Addressing a lawyer for Colorado voters opposed to Trump’s eligibility, Kagan, a liberal, 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. 

Kagan’s question seemed to signal that she had already dismissed the idea that it would be her own court’s role to remove Trump from ballots from coast to coast.

New Yorkers are due to vote in this year’s Republican primary election on April 2. Trump has been dominating the primary race, marching toward an expected general election rematch with President Biden, who trails his Republican rival in the polls.