TRUMP PASSES ONE LEGAL HURDLE

Before Monday’s United States Supreme Court ruling that Donald Trump can appear on the presidential ballot in Colorado, the former president was facing a myriad of legal troubles.

Nothing has changed. He’s still facing four major legal battles, one or more of which may reach trial status before the election in November in which he is likely to be the Republican nominee for a third consecutive time.

The Colorado decision was always likely to be decided in his favor, no matter how much stock Democrats and the national media put in it. They can claim now, as some did Monday, that using the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Trump from the ballot was always a longshot, but two left-leaning states were so confident in the court’s ruling against the former president that they followed suit in saying he couldn’t be on the ballot (pending a court decision).

More than 30 other states also had been or were considering the idea.

But the Supreme Court didn’t just tell desperate Trump opponents “no”; they said it with a unanimous ruling.

“We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office,” the unsigned opinion said. “But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”

“For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States,” the ruling also said. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.”

What the nine justices didn’t do was define the word “insurrection,” contained in Section 3 of the amendment and the word that Trump opponents were counting on to count him out, or determine whether Trump had engaged in an insurrection in his speech to protesters on Jan. 6, 2021.

Instead, they turned the ruling on whether individual states, rather than Congress, could properly remove someone in federal office or candidates for such office. Their determination was that they could not, reversing a lower court ruling and making null the decisions by Maine and Illinois (and precluding any others) that Trump would not be on their ballots.

Even if the court had deigned to define the word “insurrection,” it would have been a stretch to say the former president had engaged in it since he has not been charged with such in any of the four criminal cases in which he has been indicted.

Trump’s legal team, among the arguments in its brief to the Supreme Court, said his removal from the ballot would override the will of the voters.

Indeed, liberal Justice Elena Kagan, during the Feb. 9 oral hearing on the matter, asked, “Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens, but for the rest of the nation?”

But the court, in the end, didn’t use that argument.

Nor did turn it on the fact the 14th Amendment section did not include the word “president” in those officials who might be removed for insurrection.

During the hearing, that argument had made liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, comment: “I guess that just makes me worry that maybe they weren’t focused on the president.”

Since Colorado is one of 15 states that casts primary votes today in what is called “Super Tuesday,” Monday’s ruling was necessary for expediency and clarification (though the ballots already had been printed with the president’s name since the matter was in the process of being adjudicated).

The Colorado case won’t be the last time the Supreme Court makes a judgment that will have an effect on November’s election, either.

The justices will hear arguments in late April on whether Trump can be criminally prosecuted for conduct that allegedly involved official acts during his tenure in office. Special counsel Jack Smith had requested the high court decide the matter last month after Trump sought emergency relief there following a ruling against him by a Washington, D.C., Appeals Court panel.

The court has never decided whether a former president can be immune from criminal liability for such acts while he was in office. However, the court previously decided that a president does have absolute immunity from civil liability for official acts while in the White House.

That ruling would be expected by the end of June. We wrote in this space Sunday that we didn’t think Trump deserved another term in the White House, but attempting to remove him for acts with which he has never been charged seemed farfetched, almost comical, from the outset. But his opponents made it their most vocal cause célébre in light of the other trials that seem to be slow-walking.

Now they’ll have to pick another one.