Unanimous? Top takeaways from Supreme Court's ruling to keep Trump on the ballot
WASHINGTON ? The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected efforts by some states to declare former President Donald Trump ineligible to run again but was more divided over whether – and how – anyone else could do so.
The justices also didn’t weigh in on a central finding of Colorado’s now-reversed decision: that he can’t run because he “engaged in insurrection” by trying to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.
Former President Donald Trump declared the decision a “big win” while the challengers called the ruling a “narrow, technical” offramp that doesn’t tell the full story.
Here are the top takeaways.
An ideologically divided court agreed on a politically charged issue
Unlike in 2000, when the court split along ideological lines in stopping Florida’s recount of the presidential contest, handing that election to George W. Bush, all nine justices agreed Monday to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that an anti-insurrectionist provision of the Constitution made Trump ineligible to appear on Colorado’s primary ballot.
The justices did not want to enable a “state-by-state patchwork” of decisions on Trump’s candidacy.
It had been clear from the oral arguments that that’s where the court was heading. But the 9-0 agreement on that aspect of the decision was still notable, in part because of the widening political divisions in the country since Bush v. Gore, the last big presidential election case before the court.
The justices didn't agree on everything
The liberal justices and, separately, Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not want to go as far as the majority did in ruling for Trump.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson took the majority to task for, in their view, going beyond what was necessary to block states from acting unilaterally on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a provision enacted after the Civil War to keep insurrectionists from holding office.
“In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement,” they wrote in a six-page opinion.
In making that case, the three liberal justices referred to Chief Justice John Roberts’ departure from the court’s June 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion.
Roberts had agreed with upholding a Mississippi law restricting abortion. But he disagreed with overturning Roe v. Wade, a 50-year precedent, unnecessarily, writing: “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.”
The three liberals also quoted from Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent in Bush v. Gore: "What it does today, the Court should have left undone."
Barrett likewise said the Colorado case had not required the justices to address the “complicated question” of whether the only way to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is through congressional legislation.
But she emphasized “our differences are far less important than our unanimity.”
For their part, the majority said they went further than the others wanted in order to “provide a complete explanation” for their opinion.
The Supreme Court didn't say if Trump is an insurrectionist
During oral arguments, the justices spent little time debating whether the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol qualified as an insurrection and whether Trump played a critical role.
The Colorado Supreme Court had concluded “Trump did not merely incite the insurrection…he continued to support it.”
Trump’s lawyers had told the high court there was no insurrection and Trump “did not `incite’ anything.”
Whatever the justices may have thought about the merits of that claim, they left it out of their decision.
They also didn’t address some of Trump’s other arguments, including that the anti-insurrectionist provision of the Constitution doesn’t apply to the presidency or to former presidents like himself who never held a previous office that would have required him to swear an oath to “support” the Constitution rather than the presidential oath he took to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution.
Decision bars states from knocking Trump off ballots
The lawyers who lost the case acknowledged that the decision appears to prevent states from pursuing similar lawsuits this year to block Trump from state ballots.
“We’re still digesting this,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “What they seemed to say is that there can’t be enforcement in court unless Congress specifically authorizes it through legislation.”
The justices who wrote opinions that agreed with the overall decision – Sotomayor, Kagan and Brown Jackson, and Coney Barrett – seemed to leave open the possibility of a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s eligibility, Bookbinder said. But getting action through Congress in an election year with a Republican-controlled House and Democratic-led Senate would be difficult.
“You could certainly make the argument that that has the effect, understanding the makeup of the current Congress and the kind of supermajority you likely need to pass this type of legislation, of insulating Donald Trump at least long enough to let him run in the election in 2024,” Bookbinder said.
Decision may rule out Congress rejecting electoral college votes for Trump
The Supreme Court also appeared to rule out Congress blocking Trump from office by rejecting his Electoral College votes when certifying the election in January 2025, according to legal experts studying the opinion.
The high court’s decision seemed to say that only congressional legislation can authorize enforcement of the 14th Amendment to block a candidate who was found to be an insurrectionist, legal experts said.
“The Constitution empowers Congress to prescribe how those determinations should be made,” the decision said.
Three of the justices ? Sotomayor, Kagan and Brown Jackson ? added in a concurring opinion that the majority seemed to require tailoring new legislation to block an insurrectionist and ruled “out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”
If that interpretation is correct, legal experts said the decision seemed to rule out congressional Democrats turning the tables on Trump and using his 2020 strategy to try to change the 2024 outcome if Trump wins a majority of Electoral College votes.
The Electoral College selects the president by casting votes for the winning candidate in each state comparable to the state’s representation in Congress. Trump faces federal charges in Washington, D.C., and state charges in Georgia in part because of his strategy in 2020 to have Congress reject Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden in key swing states.
“It does seem to be at least implicit in the ruling today that trying to enforce Section 3 through other means than specifically enumerated legislation would raise serious legal questions under the decision today,” said Jason Murray, a lawyer who argued the Colorado case before the Supreme Court. “We’re continuing to look at that.”
Trump declares the decision is a `big win'
Trump described the decision as a "Big win for America!!!" and called the unanimous portion of the ruling "both unifying and inspirational."
While disappointed in the outcome, the challengers said winning at the Supreme Court wasn't their only aim.
"The other goal of our suit was to make sure that everyone knows that this portion of the Constitution exists, has power and force, which the court acknowledged that it did," said Eric Olson, one of the attorneys for the six Colorado voters who challenged Trump's eligibility.
But Trump is already looking ahead to the Supreme Court's consideration next month of whether he can be criminally charged for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
The decision the justices will make about any immunity Trump has for his actions while in office are "equally important for our country," Trump told Fox News Digital.
Also in April, the court will consider a challenge to how federal prosecutors are going after Jan. 6 rioters in a case that could also affect the federal charges against Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Biden campaign dismisses decision as irrelevant
The Department of Justice did not weigh in on the Colorado case as it was being argued. And, unlike in other high-profile cases involving federal issues, the Supreme Court did not ask for the executive branch’s views.
After the decision, a top Biden campaign official dismissed it as irrelevant.
"We don't really care," Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC. "It's not the way we've been planning to beat Donald Trump. Our focus since day one of launching this campaign has been to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box."
A landmark case? Takeaways from Trump's immunity claim at Supreme Court
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump stays on Colorado ballot: What to know from Supreme Court ruling
