Lawfare has limits, and that appears to be at the Supreme Court. While the ruling was 9-0, it was only because the Justices agreed to ignore the question of insurrection, which Donald Trump is not charged with or convicted of. Additionally, there was no insurrection. It was a rally with some rioters. The Court left it to Congress to judge whether it was an insurrection.
Had they not rejected efforts to throw Trump off the ballot, chaos and a constitutional crisis would have ensued.
The court decided that states do not have the power over federal elections. “Nothing in the Constitution delegates to the states any power to enforce Section 3 against federal office holders and candidates.”
The court pointed out that allowing individual states to disqualify candidates they didn’t like on the nebulous grounds of “insurrection” would lead to chaos. Republicans could turn around and bar Democrats in the same way.
“A single candidate [might] be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record),” the Court wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.”
Our so-called objective media and the Socialist Democrats are not taking it well. Hate trumps reason.
Rep. Raskin, the son of a famous communist, said before the election, “To know the law is to understand Trump is disqualified from office.” He now says he will sponsor a bill with Rep. Swalwell to declare the riot an insurrection.
Good luck with that.
THE SUBJECTIVE MEDIA
The Guardian
Trump’s apologists say it doesn’t matter if he’s guilty of insurrection. That’s not true
On Monday, all nine justices on the US supreme court agreed that Donald Trump should remain on the presidential ballot even if he is, in the words of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, “an oathbreaking insurrectionist”. No one challenged that finding.
[…]
Case law and legal treatises from the American Revolution until the end of Reconstruction uniformly held that persons who engaged in insurrection levied war against the US. Levying war or engaging in an insurrection, these legal authorities agreed, did not require traditional warfare but merely an assemblage resisting any federal law by force for a public purpose.
The SCOTUS Blog
Supreme Court rules states cannot remove Trump from ballot for insurrection
Barrett penned a one-page opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. In her view, the court’s holding that states cannot enforce Section 3 against presidential candidates was “sufficient to resolve this case.” The court should not, she suggested, have weighed in on “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.”
And in a relatively rare move, she appeared to criticize the tone of the joint opinion filed by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, asserting that “this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” [Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson also referred to “an oathbreaking insurrectionist.”]
Supreme Court sides with Trump, affirming each president gets one free insurrection
USA Today
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Donald Trump on Monday, affirming what those of us who’ve studied the Constitution already knew: Each president is entitled to one free insurrection.
Supreme Court restores Trump to ballot, rejecting state attempts to ban him over Capitol attack.
The AP
Supreme Court restores Trump to ballot, rejecting state attempts to ban him over Capitol attack
The justices ruled a day before the Super Tuesday primaries that states cannot invoke a post-Civil War constitutional provision to keep presidential candidates from appearing on ballots. That power resides with Congress, the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
Supreme Court rules states can’t kick Trump off the ballot
NBC News
The provision prohibits those who previously held government positions but later “engaged in insurrection” from running for various offices.
The court said the Colorado Supreme Court had wrongly assumed that states can determine whether a presidential candidate or other candidate for federal office is ineligible.
The ruling makes it clear that Congress, not states, has to set rules on how the 14th Amendment provision can be enforced against federal office-seekers. As such, the decision applies to all states, not just Colorado. States retain the power to bar people running for state office from appearing on the ballot under Section 3.
“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing section 3 against all federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the ruling said.
By deciding the case on that legal question, the court avoided any analysis or determination of whether Trump’s actions constituted an insurrection.
The Atlantic
The Supreme Court Is Not Up to the Challenge
The decision in Trump v. Anderson is another sign that the nation’s highest court will not help the country out of its political crisis.
The United States is in a moment of democratic crisis, and the Supreme Court has no idea what to do.
Today, the Court held in Trump v. Anderson that Colorado cannot disqualify Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot as an insurrectionist, a decision that functionally dooms the existing efforts to bar Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. On its face, the ruling is straightforward. All nine justices agreed that states do not have the power to disqualify candidates for federal office. Looked at more closely, though, that seeming unanimity papers over a roiling disagreement among the justices not only about how best to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment but also about the appropriate role for the Supreme Court in this period of political and constitutional tension.
What happens after historic Supreme Court ruling that states can’t ban Trump from ballot
The dispute around the country on the “insurrection clause” is now moot.
ABC News
But the new U.S. Supreme Court opinion found that the state officials had no such authority to make that determination based on the 14th Amendment.
While the justices were specifically ruling on the Colorado decision, which Trump appealed in January, their rationale should end the ongoing legal dispute nationwide.
That paves the way for Trump to remain on every state’s ballot on his path to likely winning another GOP presidential nomination and appearing in November’s general election.
Colorado Public Radio
U.S. Supreme Court shoots down Trump eligibility case from Colorado
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously repudiated the Colorado Supreme Court on Monday when it struck down a ruling disqualifying former President Donald Trump from the GOP primary ballot on the grounds that he committed insurrection.
The high court ruled that the state’s lower court overstepped and that states in general have limited authority in deciding who violates the constitution’s Insurrection Clause.
WHERE’S FOX NEWS OR NEWSMAX?
If you google “Supreme Court Insurrection,” You will not find Fox News or Newsmax.
They didn’t show up after VOX, The Conversation, Spectrum, Salon, WBAL, Voice of America (CIA paper), Slate, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, Pro Publica.
I finally gave up and just googled Fox News.
Fox News
Legal experts rally around Supreme Court ruling keeping Trump on ballot: ‘Stern warning’ to ‘radicals’
The Supreme Court sided 9-0 with the former president
Reactions from legal experts are pouring in after the Supreme Court voted unanimously in favor of former President Trump and against the effort to remove him from the Colorado ballot for allegedly taking part in an “insurrection.”
“The Court showed a divided nation that we remain bound by shared constitutional values,” George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox News immediately after the decision was read, adding that this was a “critical moment for this court in history.”
“After all of the years we have spent in this Republic, we came to a point where these states claimed that they could unilaterally bar the leading presidential candidate from ballots to prevent people from voting for Donald Trump,” Turley said. “The court here struck with a strong, and it appears unanimous, voice at least on the result that that’s not going to happen. Voters will vote. They’ll make their own verdict regardless of cases that happen involving President Trump. They will cast the most important verdict of all. They will vote for the next President of the United States.”
Subscribe to the Daily Newsletter
