Even leftists on the Supreme Court on Thursday appeared to be skeptical of a decision by an all-Democrat state court in Colorado to ban President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot.
And the justices warned the results of letting that political ruling stand, a ruling based on the Democrats’ own agenda for the coming election, could be disturbing.
If the ruling is allowed to stand, “I would expect that a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, you’re off the ballot. And others, for the Republican candidate, you’re off the ballot, and it’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” warned Chief Justice John Roberts.
“That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”
He warned the ideology behind Democrats’ lawfare against Trump, which now focuses on bringing criminal and civil charges against him and trying to convince American he’s an “insurrectionist” and shouldn’t be on the ballot, is “at war with the whole thrust of the 14th Amendment and very ahistorical.”
Democrats for years have made a talking point out of the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and claimed that Trump not only instigated it, but became an “insurrectionist” by doing that. The 14th Amendment denies federal office to those convicted of insurrection, a charge Trump has not faced.
The high court heard two hours of arguments, and justices seemed concerned about the national implications of one leftist state, which harbors extreme ideologies and has lost repeatedly at the Supreme Court in recent years over its documented “hostility” to Christianity, determining the candidates for a national election.
Elena Kagan, one of the far-left liberals on the court, commented that the decision has nationwide reach.
“If you weren’t from Colorado and you were from Wisconsin or you were from Michigan, and what the Michigan secretary of state did is going to make the difference between whether candidate A is elected or candidate B is elected, that seems quite extraordinary, doesn’t it?” she said.
Kagan asked why a single state “should have the ability to make a determination about a presidential candidate’s eligibility for office under Section 3 ‘not only for their own citizens, but for the rest of the nation,'” reported CBS.
“There’s a broader principle there, and it’s a broader principle about who has power over certain things in our federal system. And within our federal system, states have great power over many different areas. But there’s some broader principle, that there are certain national questions where states are not the repository of authority,” Kagan claimed. “Like, what’s a state doing deciding who gets to, who other citizens get to vote for for president?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the state’s agenda “has the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree.”
The report said the justices “seemed skeptical” of Colorado’s politicized ruling that casts aside a major political party’s likely candidate.
The case is Trump v. Anderson.
It came about when partisan interests in Colorado sued to have the state banish Trump from the 2024 ballot. There are seven Democrats on the state Supreme Court, and only four of them agreed that should happen.
The report explained, “The case hinges on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars officials who have sworn to support the Constitution from serving in government if they engage in insurrection. The provision was enacted in 1868 to prevent former Confederates from holding office, and laid mostly dormant for more than 150 years.”
However, the “insurrection” claim has been a talking point for Democrats only. Multiple Democrat prosecutors have had a chance to actually charge Trump with insurrection and they have failed to do so.
Another leftist, Ketanji Jackson, wondered, “Why didn’t [the drafters] put the word president in the very enumerated list in Section 3? They were listing people that were barred, and president is not there.”
Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, pointed to an 1869 case involving a criminal defendant named Caesar Griffin, believed to be the first major judicial opinion on Section 3.
The report explained, “Chief Justice Salmon Chase, serving as the circuit judge who heard cases in Virginia, held that the text of Section 3 was not self-executing and therefore could only be enforced through an act of Congress. Mitchell said Congress relied on that decision when crafting a law in 1870 that instructed federal officials to enforce Section 3.”
That would mean Colorado has no authority in the dispute.
Mitchell also confirmed to the court that the events of that riot did not rise to the level of “insurrection.”
“For an insurrection, there needs to be an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence,” he said. “This was a riot. It was not an insurrection. The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all those things, but they did not qualify as an insurrection as that term is used in Section 3.”
Associated Press, which often reports issues from a far-left perspective, said, “From across the court’s ideological divide, there was near consensus that the Colorado arguments were flawed.”
It noted multiple justices “questioned Jason Murray, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, about what would stop other states from citing Section 3 in taking aim at politicians they didn’t like.”
The report explained the problem for the plaintiffs is that they want “this case to be about Jan. 6, not Griffin’s case. That sums up their problem.”
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