It won’t be Colorado or Maine or any other state where legal challenges to former President Donald Trump’s eligibility to hold office are pending that’ll determine his placement on the 2024 presidential primary ballot.
Rather, the United States Supreme Court will decide if Trump is disqualified over accusations that he engaged in an insurrection leading up to and during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment disqualifies persons who engage in an “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding office.
Colorado’s all Democratic-appointed Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is disqualified. The ruling reversed a Denver district judge’s finding that the insurrection clause does not apply to the presidency.
CNN notes that oral arguments in front of the justices are set to take place on Feb. 8.
Friday’s decision means that the Supreme Court will take up this unprecedented case, which Trump – more than any president in the last three decades – helped shape:
Trump remains on the primary ballot as the lower-court ruling disqualifying him has been put on hold pending Supreme Court action. If the justices do conclude Trump is ineligible for public office, then any votes cast for him wouldn’t count.
The high court’s decision to hear the case puts the nine justices squarely in the middle of the 2024 election as voting starts in the early primary contests and represents the court’s most significant involvement in a presidential race since its highly consequential decision 23 years ago in Bush v. Gore.
The state court’s ruling last month all but ensured that the justices would have to take up the politically fraught case and resolve the controversial question of whether Trump can be removed from the ballot. Though the Colorado ruling applies only to that state, courts in several other states have also reviewed challenges to Trump’s eligibility, though no such case has made it as far as the one in Colorado.
Trump’s campaign said it welcomes a “fair hearing” at the Supreme Court over the Colorado ballot challenge.
“The so-called ‘ballot-challenge cases’ are all part of a well-funded effort by left-wing, political activists hell-bent on stopping the lawful reelection of President Trump this November, even if it means disenfranchising voters,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung declared. “We are confident that the fair-minded Supreme Court will unanimously affirm the civil rights of President Trump, and the voting rights of all Americans.”
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