Trump Finds Unexpected Supreme Court Allies in Ballot Fight

Former President Donald Trump found some unusual backers at the US Supreme Court among the Democratic appointees in his bid to stay on Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot.

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson were some of the most skeptical of arguments on Thursday put forth by Colorado voters seeking to keep Trump off the March 5 ballot.

While each raised different points during the historic special argument session, they shared a common desire to shape whatever opinion the court’s conservative majority is likely to produce in Trump’s favor. At bottom, the justices see where the court is headed, said Rakim Brooks, president of Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group.

“They recognize their colleagues are not likely to find that President Trump is disqualified and their job is to figure out what the narrowest ground on which they can rule,” he said.

Implications After Trump

The Colorado voters argue in their suit that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars Trump from holding office because of his actions related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, argued forcefully that Section 3 of the Civil War-era amendment doesn’t apply to presidential elections.

She suggested “that really Section 3 was about preventing the South from rising again in the context of these sort of local elections as opposed to focusing on the presidency.”

Even if Section 3 doesn’t apply to the presidency, it would still apply to everyone who runs for office and that’s what the liberals were concerned with, John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview.

The concern is about “what happens when states start saying you can’t run for Senate, you can’t run for city council, you can’t be an officer in the military,” he said. “You could be opening up this Pandora’s box. That’s, I think, what really troubled them is the implications after Trump.”

State Power

Kagan, a Barack Obama appointee, suggested that it would be “quite extraordinary” for one state to effectively decide a presidential election for the entire nation.

“Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?” Kagan asked the voters’ attorney Jason Murray, of Olson Grimsley.

It was an argument that several of her conservative colleagues latched on to during more than two hours of arguments.

Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett agreed this didn’t “seem like a state call.”

“If we affirmed and we said he was ineligible to be president, yes, maybe some states would say ‘well, you know, we’re going to keep him on the ballot anyway but, I mean, really it’s going to have, as Justice Kagan said, the effect of Colorado deciding,” Barrett said.

“It’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”

Lindsay Chervinsky, a senior fellow at the Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, said the motivations of the liberal and conservative justices are probably different.

But they understand that a divided ruling could further harm the court’s reputation, which has been hovering at a historic low, Chervinsky said.

“They are looking for a place where they can all agree and feel the least queasy,” she said.

The case is Trump v. Anderson, U.S., No. 23-719, argued 2/8/24.