Trump’s political future in hands of Supreme Court he transformed
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump touts his transformation of the U.S. Supreme Court as one of his presidency's greatest accomplishments. Now his legal and political future may lie in the hands of the court he pushed to the right.
With three Trump-appointed justices leading a conservative majority, the court is being thrust into the middle of two cases carrying enormous political implications just weeks before the first votes in the Iowa caucuses. The outcomes of the legal fights could dictate whether the Republican presidential primary front-runner stands trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and whether he has a shot to retake to the White House next November.
"The Supreme Court now is really in a sticky wicket, of historical proportions, of constitutional dimensions, to a degree that I don't think we've ever really seen before," said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Trump's lawyers plan to ask the Supreme Court to overturn a decision Tuesday barring him from Colorado's ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then "engaged in insurrection" against it from holding office. The Colorado Supreme Court ruling is the first time in history the provision has been used to try to prohibit someone from running for the presidency.
"It's a political mess the Supreme Court may have a hard time avoiding," said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor.
It comes as the justices are separately weighing a request from special counsel Jack Smith to take up and rule quickly on whether Trump can be prosecuted on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election results. Prosecutors are hoping the justices will act swiftly to answer whether Trump is immune from prosecution in order to prevent delays that could push the trial — currently scheduled to begin on March 4 — until after next year's presidential election. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the case.
The three justices appointed by Trump — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were among more than 230 federal judges installed under Trump as part of a GOP push to transform the ideological leanings of the bench. His impact on the high court has been seen in rulings rescinding the five-decade-old constitutional right to abortion, setting new standards for evaluating guns laws and striking down affirmative action in college admissions.
"This is a court that is already a lightning rod in our contemporary political discourse. A court that is viewed quite skeptically by a large swath of the American electorate," Vladeck said. But he added, "It's also a court that has not bent over backwards for Trump."
For example, in January 2022, the high court rebuffed Trump's attempt to withhold presidential documents sought by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. The justices also allowed Trump's tax returns to be handed over to a congressional committee after his refusal to release them touched off a yearslong legal fight.