Court got it mostly right

It was apparent during the oral argument that the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court were going to unanimously overrule the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court in the Donald Trump/14th Amendment case. And they didn’t disappoint, coming to the correct 9-0 conclusion that a state cannot enforce this provision of the U.S. Constitution, only the feds can.

That was enough to end the Colorado case and keep Trump on the Centennial State ballot. And it also ends the various state-by-state challenges around the country. Both proper outcomes.

While states can use 14th Amendment to forbid “any office, civil or military” on the local and state level to insurrectionists, they cannot exercise that authority over federal offices, such as Congress and the presidency and federal appointive positions.

But the unanimous nine didn’t agree on which feds have the power to use the 14th Amendment to police the ballot. Granted that a determination needs to be made on a federal level, but what federal person or persons? A federal judge? A federal agency? Congress? It’s a question that didn’t need to be addressed in the Colorado case, but the five men on the high court went ahead and said it was Congress, which needs to write a law for this situation.

The four women on the court said that was unnecessary, that the court should have just stopped at saying that the 14th Amendment is about federal power being imposed on the states, not the other way around, with states imposing on federal matters like presidential and congressional elections.

What none of the nine justices did was do anything to counter the finding of the Colorado courts that Trump is an oathbreaking insurrectionist. Nor did they address the trickier notion that the presidency is the sole public office for which the 14th Amendment’s prohibition doesn’t apply, which is what the Colorado trial judge found and the Colorado high court waved away.