Supreme Court hears Trump ballot challenge
Colorado’s Supreme Court justices turned their skeptical eyes toward the case to keep former President Donald Trump off the state’s 2024 ballot Wednesday as they heard arguments over the Republican frontrunner’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — and whether they disqualified him from running again.
The seven justices peppered both the plaintiffs in the highprofile lawsuit and Trump’s legal team with questions, including if the siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters constituted an insurrection. They also probed the legal ability of the Colorado secretary of state to keep candidates off the ballot, the language of the 14th Amendment itself — which says insurrectionists can’t run for office — as well as whether Colorado can invoke that rule on its own.
The provision at issue in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment was aimed at keeping Confederates away from federal power after the nation reunited. But its language doesn’t explicitly bar insurrectionists from the highest office in the land, prompting the Colorado justices to prod both sides about what that means.
“If it was so important that the president be included, I come back to the question: Why not spell it out?” Justice Carlos A. Samour Jr. asked the petitioners’ lawyers. “Why not include president and vice president in the way they spell out senator or representative?”
The attorneys hoping to keep Trump off Colorado’s ballot had argued that it would be “bizarre” and “counterintuitive” to read the amendment as barring rebels from most federal offices while leaving the presidency open to them.
Trump’s legal team argued the presidency was excluded on purpose, as a unique office. But would that mean, Justice Melissa Hart asked, that Jefferson Davis, the former president of the breakaway Confederacy, could have been elected U.S. president after the Civil War?
“That would be the rule of democracy at work,” replied Scott Gessler, a lead attorney for Trump and a former Colorado secretary of state.
The justices will sift through those answers and others in the weeks to come. They have no timeline to issue their ruling, though Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in January must certify the ballots for the state’s March 5 presidential primaries.