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The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2024-03-05 12:56:58.
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The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that states cannot unilaterally remove presidential candidates from the ballot. The case, Trump v. Anderson, originated as a challenge to a Colorado Supreme Court decision removing Trump from the state’s ballot under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The relevant provision barring insurrectionists from holding office reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
While all nine justices—including Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not recuse from the case despite his wife’s participation in said insurrection—agreed on overturning Colorado’s ruling, the court split on the breadth of the ruling.
The five justice majority (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) wrote that “[s]tates may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office” but “have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.” Allowing states to disqualify federal candidates, they wrote, would create a “patchwork” of inconsistent results based on a variety of conflicting procedures:
…state-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for Presidentm from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that “the President. . . represent[s] all the voters in the Nation.” Conflicting state outcomes concerning the same candidate could result not just from differing views of the merits, but from variations in state law governing the proceedings that are necessary to make Section 3 disqualification determinations… The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record).
Bizarrely, for a majority that often disenfranchises large swaths of voters by blessing suppression tactics and gerrymandering, the five justices now worry that allowing states to disqualify an insurrectionist would create “[a]n evolving electoral map” that “could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result.” Keep in mind, also, that Thomas (the only justice still on the bench) voted in favor of stopping the 2000 recount, potentially changing the election results himself.
The three liberal justices agreed, writing that allowing Colorado to keep Trump off the ballot would “create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles.” This doesn’t make sense—federalism is a state-by-state patchwork by design. We allow each of the fifty states to run their own elections by their own rules within the Constitution’s framework. For example, major political parties must clear different thresholds in different states (e.g. 3% of votes cast for governor in Alaska; 20% in Connecticut; Mississippi has no such requirement) for their candidate to appear on the ballot. Three states (Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire) do not offer early voting. 15 states only permit certain voters to request an absentee ballot based on a pre-approved list of “excuses” (that also vary wildly) of why that voter can’t make it to the polls on Election Day. These differing regulations and procedures are the definition of a “state-by-state patchwork” that potentially “nullify the votes of millions and change the election result.” Yet, the Court sees no problem here.
- As Luppe B. Luppen writes, “all of [the] sudden, and according to all the Justices, letting Colorado make up its ballot in accordance with the Constitution’s prohibition on oathbreaking insurrectionists somehow violates the Constitution’s design.”
Where the liberal justices disagree is the majority’s choice to go beyond what is necessary to resolve the case and “opine on how federal enforcement of Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] must proceed.” Congress, the majority says, must “prescribe” specific procedures to “ascertain” when an individual is disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Essentially, this means that a “Section 3 disqualification can occur only pursuant to legislation enacted for that purpose.” Trump v. Anderson did not involve federal enforcement of Section 3 nor did either party ask the Court to consider if it did.
The Court today needed to resolve only a single question: whether an individual State may keep a Presidential candidate found to have engaged in insurrection off its ballot. The majority resolves much more than the case before us. Although federal enforcement of Section 3 is in no way at issue, the majority announces novel rules for how that enforcement must operate. It reaches out to decide Section 3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a Presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course…By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.
Furthermore, as election expert Rick Hasan explains, the majority gives itself the power “to second guess any congressional decision over enforcement of Section 3.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored her own opinion expressing disapproval of the majority’s overreach, writing that the case “does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.” But, she says nothing more because “the volatile season of a Presidential election…is not the time to amplify disagreement.”
Finally, it is important to note how quickly the court can move when it wants to. The Colorado decision was issued on December 19, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the case on January 5, heard arguments on February 8, and released its opinion on March 4. All in all, the process took less than three months to decide in Trump’s favor.
Compare that timeline to the one involving Trump’s presidential immunity claim: Special Counsel Jack Smith petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to clear up the issue immediately, without waiting for the D.C. Circuit, on December 11, 2023. The Court denied his request. The D.C. Circuit heard the appeal and released its opinion denying Trump’s immunity claims on February 6. Trump appealed to SCOTUS, which then took three weeks to think about it. On February 28, the justices announced they would hear the case with a leisurely briefing schedule and oral arguments set for the week of April 22.
In the most likely scenario, the Court will release its opinion in June, six months after Smith brought his first petition. This (seemingly unnecessarily) prolonged timeline makes it unlikely that Donald Trump will go to trial for election interference before the November election.