The Supreme Court just changed part of the constitution
The Sixth Congressional District Court in Colorado ruled that Donald Trump wasn’t an “officer of the United States” (the case of Maryland, Maine, and Maine)
The case stems from a challenge brought by six Colorado voters who sought to remove Mr. Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot. If those who had taken an oath to support the constitution of the United States were to engage in insurrection or rebellion against it, they would not be allowed to hold office.
Colorado didn’t give him enough due process when it decided Section 3 applied, so a narrow ruling may have held. The court could have ruled that Trump wasn’t an “officer of the United States” as described in the section. Section 3 would have been able to block insurrectionists from the House or Senate if this ruling had been in place.
All the justices agreed that individual states may not bar candidates for the presidency under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
In many other states, the question of Trump’s disqualification is not the same. Maine’s secretary of state found that Trump wasn’t qualified to appear on the ballot, but the decision was stayed pending Trump’s appeal. A judge in a state barred Trump, but paused her ruling pending action from the Supreme Court.
The Fifth-Justice Majority Revised: Does Section 3 Matter to the President or to the State of the Union? Why Section 3 was not a First Amendment Amendment
Section 3 must be given force because of the five-justice majority opinion, which was unsigned and not directly before the court.
On a hurried schedule, the decision was made before the primaries in Colorado and around the nation. In a series of unusual moves, the court did not announce that it would issue an opinion until Sunday and did not take the bench to do so on Monday, instead simply posting the decision on its website.
In an interview on a conservative radio program, Mr. Trump said he was pleased by the outcome. “I was very honored by a nine-to-nothing vote,” he said. This is not for me, this is for future presidents.
The three liberal-leaning justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote to criticize the five-justice majority for deciding “momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily.”
The final product was thus the apparent result of a compromise in which all nine justices could say they were united on a narrow bottom line. Still, the scope of the majority opinion was the subject of harsh criticism from the liberal justices.
In all, the three justices added, “the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.”
She wrote that it was not the right time to amplify disagreement. The court resolved a politically charged issue in the middle of a presidential election. National temperature should be turned down, not up, by the writings on the court.
They wrote that an evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties and states across the country. “The disruption would be all the more acute — and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result — if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the nation has voted. We don’t have to endure such chaos, in the Constitution, at any particular time or place.
A Colorado trial judge ruled that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to the president or to the office of the presidency.
Mr. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, setting out more than half a dozen arguments about why the state court had gone astray and saying his removal would override the will of the voters.
His primary argument in the U.S. Supreme Court was that the president was not one of the officials covered by Section 3, which does not mention that office by name. The argument did not get any votes on Monday.
The Supreme Court is considering a number of cases concerning Mr. Trump. The criminal case was put on hold when the justices decided if he was immune from prosecution because of his role in the Capitol attack. The justices had already decided to rule on the scope of a central charge in the election- interference case against Mr. Trump by June.
Unanimous Supreme Court restores Trump to the Colorado ballot: How will the majority of states decide who gets to be president of the United States?
The ruling made clear that lawmakers after the Civil War intended the 14th Amendment to expand federal power, at the expense of the states, and that the Constitution “empowers Congress” to determine how to use the “severe” penalty of disqualification.
It is not much of a surprise that the final ruling is the same as the oral argument. At the Supreme Court, justices across the ideological spectrum posed difficult questions to the attorney for the voters.
The justice who was appointed by the president asked if there was an idea to think about democracy. Your position has the effect of alienating voters.
“I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state cannot decide who gets to be president of the United States,” said Kagan, who was appointed by Obama.
Chief Justice John Roberts said he could foresee, in the not-too-distant future, a world in which some states would try to boot the Democratic nominee from the ballot, and others would use Section 3 to do the same for the Republican candidate.
“It will come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” Roberts said. “That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”
The 14th Amendment as a shield to protect the Constitution for the future, and why the future is not a dusty relic
Jonathan Mitchell, a lawyer for Trump, made a series of arguments to keep the former president on the ballot. Among them: Trump is not covered by that part of the Constitution because he took a different oath of office, and that Congress would need to act, and answer key questions about disqualification, before any candidate could be removed from the ballot.
Section 3 of the 14th amendment was drafted back in 1860s to cover the former Confederacy, and so it stood as a shield to protect our Constitution for the future, and so that is not some dusty relic,” he said.
