What Does the Colorado Supreme Court Decision Mean for the Future of Trump's Candidacy?
How Will the Supreme Court Rule?
The Decision: The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot for violating the Insurrection Clause of the United States Constitution based on the former President’s actions leading up to the events at the Capitol on January 6th.
The Issues: The decision boiled down to two issues in the Insurrection Clause: Did Donald Trump engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it, and does the Insurrection Act apply to the President? The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s actions did constitute an insurrection and that the phrase “officers of the United States” in the Act applies to Presidents.
Interestingly, Trump’s legal team focused more on whether the Insurrection Act applied to the President than whether Trump’s actions constituted an Insurrection. A lower court ruled that the provision only applies to “officers of the United States,” and since the Constitution specifically includes senators, representatives, electors of the president and vice president, and all others “under the United States,” but does not specifically name the presidency, the lower court reasoned that it did not apply to the President.
The Colorado Supreme Court disagreed. “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”
What’s Next: The Supreme Court will almost certainly take up the case in the very near future.
How Will the Supreme Court Rule? That’s an interesting question, and I don’t think that it breaks 6-3, with the Republican-appointed Justices ruling in favor of the President and the Democrat-appointed Justices ruling against it.
If the only question is simply, “Does the Insurrection Act apply to the President?” it could be an interesting ruling. It is nonsense to suggest that the Insurrection Act applies to every other officer in the United States government except the President. Even the conservative justices are likely to agree. And while politically speaking, there are six Republican-appointed Justices, seven or eight of those justices probably do not like Donald Trump and would love a legally justifiable excuse to prevent him from becoming the next President since Trump will probably attempt to neuter the power of the Court (the exception being Clarence Thomas). Legally speaking, the Court should rule against Trump, but …
Will the Supreme Court Save us from Trump? That’s where things get interesting. The Supreme Court could decide the case based solely on whether the Insurrection Act applies to the President, but if the Supreme Court decides that it does, there will be chaos. States beyond Colorado could remove Trump from the ballot. Red states and swing states could remove Trump from the primary ballot — after all, this action began with active members of the Federalist Society and applies to the Republican primaries. This is not necessarily being pushed by Democrats. It’s being pushed by other conservatives.
That’s precisely the reason that the Supreme Court will probably find a reason not to apply the Insurrection Act to Donald Trump. The Supreme Court doesn’t want to take power out of the voters’ hands. The Supreme Court will probably rule that the decision should be left to the voters to decide at the ballot box. I think it’s likely even the liberal justices would agree that removing Trump from the ballot is anti-democratic. The Supreme Court does not want to take the heat for essentially determining the outcome of the next Presidential election. They will argue that the judiciary should not meddle in elections; the liberal justices may mean it. The conservative justices will say it because it’s politically convenient to them.
Ultimately, and unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will save America from another Donald Trump term. America is going to have to save America from another Donald Trump term.
Well, well, well, is this where the conservatives who love the constitution so much they should really get a room sit their asses down because Trump has clearly run afoul of their sacred text? What’s that, now? Oh, this is where they’ll argue only original recipe constitution and not extra crispy amendments because the founders were infallible and…. Yeah, this is where Republicans do the Smiegal/ Gollum arguing with themselves routine, and we only need to point out that this particular call was coming from inside the house - rather the Federalist Society mansion in Capitol Hill.
Oh, great. It's up to Americans to save Americans. I don't trust those guys.