The United States Supreme Court will today hear the Democrats’ efforts to remove President Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
SCOTUS justices will debate the politically motivated case that seeks to interfere in the 2024 election by blocking voters from choosing Trump as the 47th president.
The case is the first of what could be several legal challenges against Trump to confront the nine justices.
At issue is whether Trump committed “insurrection” during protests at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
However, there was no “insurrection” on that day and Trump has never been charged or convicted of such a crime.
Nevertheless, the Democrats have continued to peddle the false claim because it would make him constitutionally ineligible to be re-elected president.
That, in turn, could block him from appearing on a state primary ballot as a candidate for that office.
Oral arguments are scheduled for Thursday at 10 a.m. ET and an expedited ruling could come within days or weeks.
Spectators began lining up outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Wednesday with blankets and chairs, hoping to secure one of the few seats reserved for the public.
These issues have never been tested at the nation’s highest court and are framed as both a constitutional and political fight with enormous stakes for public confidence in the judicial system and the already divisive electoral process.
In a written brief filed Monday, Trump’s attorneys made references to the Iowa caucus, the Gettysburg Address, and Venezuela’s government in slamming Colorado’s high court ruling removing him from the ballot.
“President Donald J. Trump won the Iowa caucuses with the largest margin ever for a non-incumbent and the New Hampshire primary with the most votes of any candidate from either party,” the Trump legal team wrote.
“He is the presumptive Republican nominee and the leading candidate for President of the United States.
“In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,’ … the American people — not courts or election officials — should choose the next President of the United States …
“Yet at a time when the United States is threatening sanctions against the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela for excluding the leading opposition candidate for president from the ballot, respondent Anderson asks this Court to impose that same anti-democratic measure at home.”
Trump’s attorneys emphasized that 60 state and federal courts nationwide have refused to remove the former president from the ballot, calling the Colorado Supreme Court “the lone outlier.”
They ask the Supreme Court to reverse the Colorado ruling “and protect the rights of the tens of millions of Americans who wish to vote for President Trump.”
The 14th Amendment, Section 3 of the Constitution states:
“No person shall… hold any office… under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
In December, Democrat judges on Colorado’s highest court incorrectly ruled that the clause covers Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, and therefore does apply to a president despite not being explicitly indicated in the text.
“President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president,” the state court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
“Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the election code for the secretary to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
The issue could turn on whether the high court interprets “officer of the United States” to apply to a president’s conduct in office.
Trump’s legal team in its merits brief said:
“The [Supreme] Court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots.”
The Constitution treats the presidency separately from other federal officers, Trump’s team argued.
“The president swears a different oath set forth in Article II, in which he promises to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States’ — and in which the word ‘support’ is nowhere to be found,” as it appears in Section 3, Trump’s team wrote.
But lawyers for the Colorado voters challenging Trump’s eligibility said in response:
“The thrust of Trump’s position is less legal than it is political. He not-so-subtly threatens ‘bedlam’ if he is not on the ballot.
“But we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.
“Section 3 is designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again.
“Nobody, not even a former President, is above the law,” the brief added, comparing Trump to a “mob boss.”
