The U.S. Supreme Court has indicated that, on Feb. 8, it’s set to hear the first oral arguments in former President Donald Trump’s appeal that seeks to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds.
What Will SCOTUS Do?
The Colorado high court, which is composed entirely of Democrat appointees, determined in a 4–3 ruling in December that President Trump had engaged in an “insurrection” in the context of the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, and so he is ineligible to run for president.The ruling was based on an interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars any former oath-taking “officer of the United States” who “engaged in insurrection” from “holding any office, civil or military.”
Legal experts have said there are several ways the Supreme Court could reverse the Colorado decision without weighing into the substance of whether President Trump “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6.
“There’s a fairly good chance that they'll find a way to duck that,” Harvard Law professor emeritus and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told ABC News.
One such way would be for the Supreme Court to say that the U.S. President isn’t an “officer of the United States” but part of the executive branch and rule that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment simply doesn’t apply.
“More boldly, the Court could hold that the conjunction of Trump’s tweets and speeches, the January 6 report, and expert testimony were not ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that Trump engaged in insurrection,” Mr. Unikowsky wrote.
Whichever path the Supreme Court chooses, Mr. Unikowsky said that writing an opinion in the case will be a formidable challenge.
“It’s a head-scratcher,” he said.
‘Chaos And Bedlam’
In their opening brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 18, President Trump’s attorneys asked the high court to reverse the Colorado ruling, arguing that other states are following suit with similar 14th Amendment-based legal challenges and that preventing Americans from being able to vote for him in the 2024 Republican primary would “unleash chaos and bedlam.”The attorneys revealed in the brief that efforts are underway in over 30 states to keep President Trump off the ballot, all based on the theory that he somehow engaged in an insurrection and so should be disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
The logic of applying this section of the Constitution is based on the presumption that the Jan. 6, 2021 incident was an insurrection in which President Trump supposedly engaged by encouraging his supporters to protest at the U.S. Capitol against the certification of electoral college votes in what he insisted was a “rigged” election.
In their brief, President Trump’s attorneys argued that the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualification ruling was “based on a dubious interpretation” of the 14th Amendment while relying heavily “on a hearsay congressional report and experts of dubious reliability.”
“Most Court watchers think the justices will blink and find a way to avoid ruling against the former president,” Kent Greenfield, a law professor and former Supreme Court law clerk, wrote in a recent op-ed for WBUR. “To bar him would require a nervy assertion of judicial authority.”
