Do You Agree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision about Trump?

The United States Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 to reverse Colorado’s highest court and to restore former President Donald Trump to the state’s ballot – in time for Colorado’s presidential primary tomorrow. By their decision, the Supreme Court restored the right of 4.5 million registered voters to determine for themselves who should be President of the United States.

The court in Colorado claimed that Trump was guilty of “insurrection” even those Trump has never been charged, indicted, or convicted of insurrection. In their article at The Daily Signal, Hans von Spakovsky and Charles Stimson explained how the Colorado court’s use of the Fourteen Amendment was not good enough. 

The Colorado court claimed that because Trump was guilty of "insurrection," it could remove him from the ballot under Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment is one of three Reconstruction amendments adopted after the end of the Civil War, and its Section 3 was intended to keep certain Confederate military and government officials from serving in state and federal government.

Section 3 provides that:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector for President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same … But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

But all nine justices of the Supreme Court agreed in Monday’s decision that Colorado could not remove Trump from the ballot. As the unsigned opinion says, since “the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” state courts and state officials have no power to remove federal candidates from the ballot.

Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment has language found in many other amendments, namely: “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The high court concluded that Congress’ power under Section 5 to pass appropriate legislation to enforce the 14^th Amendment “is critical when it comes to Section 3.” The court noted that the “terms of the Amendment speak only to enforcement by Congress,” not the states, and the text “does not affirmatively delegate such power to the States.”

Although the states retain sovereign power to determine the qualifications of their own state officeholders, the court ruled, they have no such power over federal officeholders. Granting the states such “authority would invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power,” the nine justices said.

Nor is there “any tradition of state enforcement of Section 3 against federal officeholders or candidates in the years following ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

In addition to the above reason for the 9 to 1 vote, the court indicated that letting states enforce Section 3 would result in a “patchwork” effect and “would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that ‘the President … represent[s] all the voters in the Nation.’”