Trump prevails in Supreme Court challenge to his eligibility

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states cannot prevent former President Donald J. Trump from running for another term. It rejected an eligibility challenge from Colorado, which threatened to upend the presidential race by removing him from ballots across the country.

Although the judges gave different reasons, the decision was unanimous. All opinions focused on legal issues, and none took a position on whether Mr. Trump was guilty of insurrection, as the Colorado courts had found.

All the justices agreed that individual states may not bar candidates for president under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that bars insurrectionists from holding office. Four justices would have left it at that, with the court’s three liberal members expressing dismay at what they said was the majority’s baffling approach.

But the five-justice majority, in an unsigned opinion answering questions not directly submitted to the court, ruled that Congress must act to give Section 3 force.

“The Constitution makes Congress, and not the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the majority wrote, adding that detailed federal legislation was needed to determine who was disqualified under the provision.

The decision was made on a hasty schedule, which took place the day before the Super Tuesday primaries in Colorado and across the country. In a series of unusual steps, the court only announced on Sunday that it would issue an opinion and did not sit on Monday to do so, but simply posted the decision on its website.

The decision was the Court’s most significant ruling regarding presidential elections since George W. Bush prevailed Bush vs. Gore in 2000.

In an interview on a conservative radio program, Mr. Trump said he was satisfied with the outcome. “I was very honored to receive a vote of nine to none,” he said. “And this is for future presidents; this is not for me.”

The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — expressed frustration over what they said was the unnecessary overreach of the majority in a joint concurring opinion. They said the majority opinion was intended to “protect the court and Mr. Trump from future controversy.”

An earlier version of the decision suggested that the gap between the majority and the three liberal justices had ever been wider. As noted by Mark Joseph Stern, legal affairs reporter at Slate, a forensic examination of the decision has been posted on the court’s website appeared to show that what eventually became the common agreement was once a partial dissent attributed to “Sotomayor, J., who concurred in part and dissented in part.”

The final product was thus the apparent result of a compromise in which all nine justices could say they were united on one issue. Still, the scope of the majority opinion was the subject of harsh criticism from the liberal justices.

“The court had to resolve only one question today: whether an individual state may keep from its ballot box a presidential candidate who has committed an insurrection,” they wrote. “The majority solves much more than the case before us.

“While federal enforcement of Section 3 is in no way in question,” the opinion said, “the majority is promulgating new rules for how that enforcement should work. It seeks to answer questions about Section 3 that are not before us, and to preclude future attempts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case that requires judicial restraint, that course is abandoned.”

The first line of the concurrence seemed designed to galvanize Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was likely the primary author of the unsigned majority opinion. Citing the chief justice’s concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the three liberals wrote: “If it is not necessary to decide more to dismiss a case to act, then it is necessary not decide more.”

They added that the majority had “decided new constitutional issues to protect this court and the petitioner” — Mr. Trump — “from future controversy.”

“In doing so,” the three justices wrote, “the majority closes the door to other possible means of federal enforcement.”

They provided some examples of ways in which the majority opinion undermined the power of Section 3. For example, they wrote that the majority “precludes judicial enforcement of that provision, as might occur when a party is persecuted by an insurgent and raises a defense.” at that point.” By requiring Congress to tailor legislation, the three justices wrote, the majority appeared to “preclude enforcement under general federal statutes that require the government to comply with the law.”

In all, the three justices added, “the majority seeks to protect all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their federal office.”

In a brief concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed that the majority had gone too far, saying it “should not have addressed the complicated question of whether federal law is the exclusive means by which Section 3 can be enforced.”

But she urged the public to focus on what the judges had in common.

“This is not the time to increase disagreement with stridency,” she wrote. “The court has resolved a politically charged issue in the volatile presidential election season. Particularly in these circumstances, writings about the court should lower, not raise, the national temperature.

“For present purposes,” Judge Barrett wrote, “our disagreements are far less important than our concord: all nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans need to take home.”

Indeed, there was something approaching a consensus on both the scope of state power and the undesirability of a patchwork of different approaches.

“States may disqualify individuals who possess or attempt to retain property stands office,” the majority wrote. “But states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency.”

The alternative, the majority said, was chaos.

“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and states across the country, in different ways and at different times,” they wrote. “The disruption would be all the more acute – and could wipe out the votes of millions and change the election outcome – if an attempt were made to enforce Section 3 after the nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires us to endure such chaos – which could occur at any time or at any time, up to and perhaps after the inauguration.”

The case arose from a challenge by six voters in Colorado who sought to disqualify Mr. Trump from voting in the state’s Republican primary under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The provision was passed after the Civil War to prohibit those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they had subsequently “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to its enemies.”

A Colorado judge ruled that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to the president or the office of president.

The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the first part of the ruling — that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection. His efforts, as outlined in the courts’ opinions, included seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; trying to change the number of votes; encouraging false slates from competing voters; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and called on his supporters to march to the Capitol.

But the majority of the Colorado Supreme Court overturned the part of the judge’s decision that said Section 3 did not apply to the president or the presidency.

Mr. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, making more than a half-dozen arguments about why the state court had gone astray and said his removal would override the will of the voters.

His main argument before the U.S. Supreme Court was that the president was not one of the officials covered by Section 3, which does not mention that office by name. That argument received no votes on Monday.

The case of Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, is not the only one involving Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court docket. The justices said last week they would decide whether he was immune from prosecution for his role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, delaying trial in his criminal case while they considered the case. And the justices have already agreed to rule in June on the scope of a central charge in the federal election interference case against Mr. Trump.

Michael Gold contributed reporting from New York.