Colorado lacks the authority to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s election ballot, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday in an opinion that seems to end all legal actions to declare Trump an insurrectionist who is ineligible to hold the office.
A unanimous court issued the decision reversing the Colorado Supreme Court, which in December voted 4-3 to remove Trump from the state’s ballot based on the wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That section bars those who have engaged in insurrections or rebellions from holding certain offices.
The nine justices found that the states cannot enforce Section 3 for federal officers.
“We conclude that states may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office,” the court said. “But states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency.”
All of the justices found that allowing Colorado’s decision to stand would result in electoral chaos that the framers of the Constitution never envisioned.
“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),” the court’s opinion states. “The ‘patchwork’ that would likely result from state enforcement would ‘sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the national government and the people of the United States’ as a whole.”
But four justices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, disagreed with the court’s majority that the provisions of the 14th Amendment “speak only to enforcement by Congress, which enjoys power to enforce the Amendment through legislation. […]” They suggest Section 3 could be enforced by other legitimate means.
“Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oath-breaking insurrectionist from becoming president,” the concurring opinion written by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson states. “Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”
Professor Thomas Keck, a constitutional law and politics expert at Syracuse University, said the reversal of the Colorado Supreme Court opinion was reasonable.
“There are legitimate concerns with the sort of conflicting kind of patchwork practice that could emerge if states were enforcing the provision in different ways,” Keck told Legal Newsline.
But he disagreed that the court resolved all the issues in a sensible way.
“As a matter of text and historical understanding of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, I think it clearly applies to Donald Trump,” Keck said. “And now the court just basically didn't address that.”
By designating Congress the exclusive enforcement mechanism for Section 3, the court made it practically impossible for that section to be enforced, given the current dysfunctional and polarized state of Congress, he said. Passing such legislation in the U.S. Senate would require a supermajority vote, and a future president could veto such legislation, according to Keck, who added that such a law could eventually come back before the high court for judicial review.
Previously filed lawsuits and other actions by state officials and private individuals to keep Trump off state ballots will likely be moot as a result of the decision, he said.
Trump himself welcomed the high court’s opinion.
“I have great respect for the Supreme Court, and I want to just thank them for working so quickly and so diligently and so brilliantly and, again, this is a unifying factor,” the former president said in a statement on Monday.