Supreme Court Rules Trump Can Appear On Presidential Ballots

Donald Trump

(Bloomberg) -- The US Supreme Court said Donald Trump can appear on presidential ballots this year, putting an end to efforts to ban him under a rarely used constitutional provision barring insurrectionists from holding office.

The unanimous ruling Monday overturned a Colorado Supreme Court decision that said Trump forfeited his right to run for president again by trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. The high court acted a day before Super Tuesday, when Colorado and 14 other states and one territory hold presidential primaries.

“Responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the states,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, referring to the provision in the 14th Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding office.

A state official in Maine and a judge in Illinois had also declared Trump ineligible to appear on the ballot, and litigation was taking place in other states as well. The high court ruling effectively ends those efforts.

The three liberal justices wrote separately to say the court went further than it needed to in resolving the case. They said in a concurring opinion the court “attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.”

The ruling was perhaps the court's biggest presidential election decision since the 5-4 Bush v. Gore case ended the 2000 deadlock and dealt a blow to the court's reputation.

The voters, represented by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said a five-day hearing in Colorado established that Trump was part of an insurrection that tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden.

The former president told the justices in court papers that efforts to bar him from running would unleash “chaos and bedlam” if successful.

Trump's primary argument was that the president isn't covered by the insurrection clause, which applies to anyone who was an “officer of the United States.” Trump's lawyers said the phrase is a legal term of art that elsewhere in the Constitution excludes the president.

Trump also argued he didn't “engage in” insurrection. In concluding he did, the Colorado Supreme Court pointed to his unsupported claims of a stolen election, his fiery Jan. 6 speech and his demands that Vice President Mike Pence refuse to certify the results.

Trump also contended that Congress must set up an enforcement system before the insurrection clause can be used. He also said the provision bars people only from holding office, not from running for it.

The case is Trump v. Anderson, 23-719.

(Updates with excerpt from concurring opinion in fifth paragraph.)

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com