Former President Donald Trump was elated to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a decision in Colorado, allowing the Republican front runner for the 2024 presidential nomination to remain on the state's primary ballot.
"BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!" Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social.
The decision also applies to ballots in all states that have attempted to remove Trump.
It was handed down just one day before Super Tuesday, in which Trump and GOP opponent Nikki Haley will face off in 15 states in what could provide the former president with a massive delegate lead.
The Context
The 9-0 ruling overturns a previous Colorado Supreme Court decision on December 19, 2023, that was viewed by Trump and his supporters as highly partisan, with the court arguing that Trump's alleged actions around January 6, 2021, provided legal justification to restrict him from having ballot access.
What We Know
Trump was ruled ineligible in Colorado for his alleged encouragement of the January 6 riot at the Capitol in 2021 and claims that he illegally tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election following a lawsuit filed on September 6, 2023, on behalf of six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters.
The state court ruled that Trump violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, an amendment in the wake of the Civil War that says that a person who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" after taking an oath of office to support the Constitution should be barred from running for office again.
That ruling was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 3. In early February, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case.
"The United States Supreme Court has ruled that states do not have the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates," Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement shared with Newsweek. "In accordance with this decision, Donald Trump is an eligible candidate on Colorado's 2024 Presidential Primary."
Trump will also remain on the ballot in Maine and Illinois, where he was also barred from their respective ballots under the same subversion clause of the 14th amendment.
Also in late December, Shenna Bellows, Maine's secretary of state, barred Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause. Maine became the second state to block Trump based on the clause.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump's campaign, said following the decision that Bellows is "a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden."
"I have reviewed the Anderson decision carefully," Bellows said in a statement on Monday shared with Newsweek. "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that individual states lack authority to enforce Section Three of the 14th Amendment with respect to federal offices.
"Consistent with my oath and obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and pursuant to the Anderson decision, I hereby withdraw my determination that Mr. Trump's primary petition is invalid."
Last Wednesday, Cook County Judge Tracie Porter ruled that Trump's name must be removed from the Illinois state ballot, overturning a circuit court ruling. However, the case is stayed pending appeals.
Newsweek reached out to the three states' secretaries of state via email for comment.
Views
The 20-page unanimous ruling in Trump v. Anderson included support from liberal Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"Allowing Colorado to [keep a presidential candidate off a ballot and disqualify him] would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation's federalism principles," the three liberal justices write in the opinion.
However, they say the conservative majority "goes further."
"They decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy," they add. "Although only an individual State's action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so.
"The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment."
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, told Newsweek via email that the oral argument made the unanimity of the result "unsurprising."
"I wasn't persuaded by the Court's reasoning, but my principal reaction is to agree strongly with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson," Tribe said.
Tribe elaborated in a post on X, formerly Twitter, writing: "As Roberts rightly wrote in Dobbs, the Court should avoid deciding any more than it needs to decide when ruling on a case. To reach out and resolve in advance all sorts of issues that might arise in the future is to take on the role of a super-legislature, not a court of law."
"There's not much surprise after oral argument that the decision was unanimous," University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller told Newsweek via email. "The justices were broadly skeptical at oral argument that one state should have this power to affect a federal office-seeker.
"In that respect, it's entirely consistent with other structural federalism concerns in the Court's precedents. But it is definitely a narrow opinion on this unanimous point, one that really speaks about Section 3 only as it relates to federal offices and how states administer the ballot."
"The Supreme Court decided to ignore Donald Trump's role in the 2021 insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power," ProgressNow Colorado Executive Director Sara Loflin said in a statement shared with Newsweek. "The 14th Amendment is clear that insurrectionists cannot run for President of the United States. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that only Congress can enforce this provision."
Political strategist Jay Oliver told Newsweek via email that the decision "speaks volumes" and comes at a pivotal time ahead of Super Tuesday.
"It accentuates that only Congress, and not individual states, can disqualify candidates for federal office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment...and maybe the most important aspect of this decision, all by not taking the bench, is to take a candidate off the ballot simply because [he] arguably is not liked, when in fact the voters of this country should have that ultimate decision," Oliver said.
"The 9-0 ruling really underscores how all the left's celebrated legal 'experts' are legal imbeciles whose real talent is ruthlessly weaponizing the justice system against their enemies," wrote Stephen Miller, Trump's former senior adviser, on X.
What's Next
The ruling comes one day before a pivotal series of primary elections across 15 states on Tuesday, all as Trump is on his way to be the Republican Party's presidential nominee for the third straight election.
He holds a commanding polling lead against Haley, who has vowed to forge on in her own campaign. On Sunday, the former South Carolina governor claimed 19 delegates by winning the Washington D.C. primary—becoming the first female GOP winner of a presidential primary.
Update 03/04/24, 1:27 p.m. ET: This story was updated with a statement by Shenna Bellows.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
