Trump asks Supreme Court to rule he is eligible for office
Former President Donald J. Trump urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a ruling that barred him from the primary ballot in Colorado and made him eligible to run for president.
Mr. Trump's orderHis major entry in an extraordinary case that had the potential to change the course of the presidential election was a powerful recitation of more than half a dozen arguments about why the Colorado Supreme Court had gone astray in labeling him an insurrectionist government was barred from office. Constitution.
“The court must quickly and decisively end these efforts to disqualify ballots, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and promise to unleash mayhem and mayhem if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado's lead and the likely Republican presidential primary to rule out. nominated from their ballots,” the letter said.
The case will be heard on February 8 and the court is likely to rule on it soon, perhaps on March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.
The case centers on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Passed after the Civil War, it prohibits those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies . of them.”
Congress can lift the ban, the provision says, but only with a two-thirds majority in each chamber.
The Colorado court ruled that Section 3 also applies to Mr. Trump in light of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The Colorado case is one of several involving Trump, affecting the Supreme Court's role or in the offing. An appeals court is expected to decide in the coming days whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and an appeal to the Supreme Court against that ruling is highly likely. And the justices have already agreed to decide the scope of a central charge in the federal election interference case against Mr. Trump, with a ruling due in June.
Mr. Trump's letter attacked Colorado's ruling on many grounds. If he can convince a majority of the judges on any of these points, he will prevail. All of Mr. Trump's arguments are sharply disputed, many of which have drawn criticism from leading legal scholars.
The letter stated that Trump himself was “not involved in an insurrection.”
“President Trump never participated in or directed the illegal conduct that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the letter said. “In fact, the opposite is true, as President Trump has repeatedly called for peace, patriotism and law and order.”
The letter added: “Raising concerns about the integrity of the recent federal election and pointing out reports of fraud and irregularities does not constitute an act of violence or a threat of violence. And giving an impassioned political speech and telling supporters to metaphorically 'fight like hell' for their beliefs is not an insurrection either.”
In an earlier letter, Trump's lawyers made a broader argument: that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an insurrection at all. The new assignment focused on Mr. Trump's own conduct.
“Section 3 is not a regime of vicarious liability,” the letter said, “and there is no legal basis for attributing the conduct of others to President Trump.” It added that Mr. Trump's Jan. 6 speech was protected by the First Amendment.
The lead attorney on the new assignment was Jonathan F. Mitchell, who rose to fame as the architect of a new law in Texas that sharply restricted abortions there by allowing private lawsuits against providers of the procedure.
The letter's main argument was that Section 3 did not apply to Mr. Trump because the president was not among the officials covered by the provision. “The President is not an 'officer of the United States' as that term is used in the Constitution,” the letter said.
Additionally, the letter argued, “Section 3 applies only to those who have taken an oath to 'support' the Constitution of the United States.” But, the report continued, “the President swears a different oath as set forth in Article II, in which he pledges to 'preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States' – and in which the word 'support' appears nowhere. found it.”
Along the same lines, the letter also said that the presidency was not one of the offices from which officials who violate the oath were barred. “To accept the Colorado Supreme Court's assertion that Section 3 includes the presidency,” the letter said, “one must conclude that the framers decided to bury the most visible and prominent national office in a collective noun that also includes low-ranking military officers includes, while choosing to explicitly mention presidential electors. This reading defies common sense. ”
The letter stated that Section 3 disqualified people subject to it from holding office – not from seeking it. If the candidate were elected, the brief said, Congress could lift that disqualification before the candidate's term began.
The Colorado case, Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, produced several friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Mr. Trump on Thursday, including one on behalf of 179 Republican members of Congress, including Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The short one urged the justices to “minimize the partisan incentive to keep opponents off the ballot using the incredible sanction of Section 3,” adding that “the decision below will only give state officials a boost to build base for labeling political opponents as involved in an insurrection.”
Briefing from the six electors who prevailed on the Colorado Supreme Court, along with submissions from friends of the court who supported them, is due Jan. 31.