As of: March 5, 2024, 9:26 a.m
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Directional decision in the USA: The Supreme Court overturns Trump's pre-election exclusion in Colorado.
This further strengthens the former president.
Washington, DC – As 2024 dawned, it seemed as if the presidential race would play out in the courts just as it did on the campaign trail.
Former President Donald Trump faced two federal charges.
Two federal lawsuits brought the total number of charges against him to 91. Challenges to his eligibility mounted and the Supreme Court was asked to consider whether Trump should even be allowed to run.
Two months later, federal proceedings have slowed to the point where a verdict is considered unlikely before November.
One of the state cases was derailed by a sex scandal.
The other case is scheduled to be heard later this month but is widely seen as the least significant of all.
Demonstrators for and against Donald Trump protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC last month.
© Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Trump wins in Supreme Court – deletion from the ballot is unlawful
And the challenge to Trump's eligibility was finally decided on Monday: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states do not have the authority to disqualify him.
For anyone who had hoped that Trump's efforts to overturn the last election would result in the justice system seriously punishing him before the next election, recent developments have proven sobering.
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“The real takeaway is that the courts will not save us from ourselves,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, “and that is the only surefire way to ensure that an anti-Democratic presidential candidate does not succeed , is to beat him at the ballot box.”
Although the court had been widely expected to rule in Trump's favor, the decision came amid a series of setbacks in efforts to hold Trump accountable for his efforts to disrupt the transfer of power following the 2020 US election.
Trump is also ahead of President Biden in many head-to-head contests and continues to dominate the Republican primaries, with the chance to put the intra-party competition virtually out of reach on Tuesday, when voting takes place in 15 states.
In its 9-0 decision, the court overturned a December ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that struck down Trump based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Civil War-era provision bars people from taking an oath to the Constitution and then incited an uprising to hold office again.
The Colorado court based its decision on Trump's role in the events surrounding the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Trump is the first former president to be charged with a crime.
He faces four separate lawsuits, two of which relate to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
All nine justices - the six conservatives and the three liberals - said that a single state should not be able to bar a candidate from running for federal office.
They warned of the consequences of a nationwide patchwork that would exclude candidates in some states but not others.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talks to the crowd during a rally in Greensboro, N.C., on Saturday.
© Scott Muthersbaugh/The Washington Post
"Nothing in the Constitution requires us to endure such chaos - which may occur at any time or at various times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration," the court said in an unsigned, 13-page opinion.
The move to disqualify Trump on the basis of the rarely used Section 3 had divided constitutional scholars.
Some supported the case, while others expressed doubts about the legality or practical implications of stopping Trump from running - or both.
US Supreme Court clears the way for Trump to continue participating in primaries
Mark Graber, a University of Maryland constitutional law scholar who published a book on the history of the 14th Amendment last year, said the justices appeared to have focused on the practical effects of a ban, but the legal basis of the decision was thin.
“The statement makes sense from a political perspective,” said Graber.
While it "might be a good idea to have a rule that states cannot disqualify federal officials or candidates for federal office," Graber said, there is nothing in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment that says "states may, but not disqualify, state officials." Federal officials.”
J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former U.S. Court of Appeals judge who co-wrote an article for The Atlantic with Laurence H. Tribe in August that helped spark interest in the 14th Amendment as a way to disqualify Trump , cited language from the three liberal justices in their concurring opinion that criticized elements of the majority decision.
Liberals agreed with conservatives that states should be prohibited from disqualifying candidates from presidential elections under Section 3, while they disagreed with the majority, which specified Congress' role in disqualification.
This standard, Luttig said, makes it virtually impossible to exclude rioters from holding federal office.
“The Court ruled today that no person will be disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, regardless of whether he or she has participated in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States,” Luttig said.
“The decision is astonishing in its implications.”
Monday's decision had an immediate impact, scuttling efforts by states across the country to ban Trump from running.
Within hours of the ruling, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows reversed her earlier decision that Trump should be barred from voting in her state.
Maine's primary election takes place on Tuesday.
Trump goes into super election day strengthened with a legal victory
In his comments shortly after the ruling, Trump praised the court's decision and then quickly moved on to another case of "equal importance" involving his broad claim to impunity for actions taken while he was president.
The Supreme Court agreed last week to consider Trump's arguments on the matter and scheduled oral arguments for late April.
The decision was a setback for special counsel Jack Smith's efforts to move the Jan. 6 case quickly to trial and cast doubt on whether a verdict would be reached before the November election.
Trump's allies cheered Monday's decision.
“Today the Supreme Court unanimously showed us that we cannot silence the voice of the American people and we cannot stop democracy,” Alina Habba, one of Trump’s lawyers, wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The court specifically did not address whether Trump incited an insurrection.
In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) said that while she welcomed the clarity the decision provided to millions of Americans preparing to vote, she was "disappointed" by the ruling.
“It means that candidates who violate the federal oath can run for office again in the face of congressional dysfunction,” she said.
Former Colorado House and Senate Majority Leader Norma Anderson, a Republican who served as a plaintiff in the case, said the court's decision does not change the fact that Donald Trump committed insurrection against the United States Constitution .
She added that she now believes that “the lawsuits against Donald Trump do nothing to hinder him.
What we need to do is go to the polls.
Biden doesn't care about Supreme Court ruling
Biden's deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks also shared this opinion.
In an appearance on MSNBC, he said that the Colorado decision “doesn’t really concern us.”
“Since day one of our campaign, we have been focused on defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box.
When asked about the case in December, Biden said it was "obvious" that Trump was a seditionist - although he did not comment on how the court should rule.
“I will leave it up to the court to decide whether the 14th Amendment applies,” the president told reporters.
“But he certainly supported an uprising.
There is no doubt about that.
No.
Zero."
Still, Biden has spent much of his reelection bid on the idea that he is uniquely positioned to protect the nation's democracy by defeating Trump and preventing him from returning to the Oval Office.
Biden's advisers and allies have described the prospect of a second Trump term as an existential threat to Americans' basic freedoms and sense of security - a message they say they can convey more effectively when it becomes clear that neither the courts nor the Republican primaries will keep the former president off the ballot in November.
Biden and his allies say they look forward to another face-off between the two men that will once again offer voters a clear choice.
“I’m the only one who ever beat him,” Biden said in an interview with The
New Yorker
published Monday .
“And I’ll beat him again.”
To the authors
Sarah Ellison
is a New York-based contributing editor at The Washington Post.
She previously wrote for Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, where she started as a news assistant in Paris.
Toluse “Tolu” Olorunnipa
is the White House bureau chief at The Washington Post and co-author of “His Name is George Floyd,” which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
He has worked for the Post since 2019 and has covered the last three presidents.
He previously worked at Bloomberg News and the Miami Herald, reporting from Washington and Florida.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 5, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.