Posted on 01/03/24
| News Source: The Hill
Former President Trump on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to overturn a Colorado court’s landmark ruling disqualifying him from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection ban.
The appeal likely sets up an extraordinary battle at the nation’s highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That clause, added after the Civil War, blocks anyone who swore an oath to “support” the U.S. Constitution but “engaged in insurrection” against it from holding federal office.
“The Colorado Supreme Court has no authority to deny President Trump access to the ballot,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in the petition. “By doing so, the Colorado Supreme Court has usurped Congressional authority and misinterpreted and misapplied the text of section 3.”
Trump’s petition asks that the Supreme Court agree to take up the case and immediately reverse the Colorado ruling in a summary decision without oral argument or extensive briefing. The other parties in the case previously agreed the justices should hear the case on an expedited schedule, so a decision may be issued before most states’ primaries, but they did not suggest the high court forgo the step of holding oral arguments.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in December that Trump engaged in insurrection by inflaming his supporters with false claims of election fraud after the 2020 race and directing them to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, barring him from appearing on the state’s primary ballot as he seeks a second term in the White House.
The state’s highest court also notably reversed a trial judge’s finding that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to the presidency, writing that the presidential oath’s specific language “does not make it anything other than an oath to support the Constitution.”
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the majority opinion reads. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us.”
If allowed to stand, Trump’s lawyers wrote, the ruling “will mark the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.”