Former President Donald Trump was handed a major victory on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he cannot be excluded from Colorado’s primary election ballot over his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform.
The former president had appealed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify him under the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, the so-called insurrection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The unanimous decision came just one day before Colorado voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday.
Here’s what to know about the ruling.
🔎 What the ruling said
“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the justices wrote.
It’s the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on the insurrection clause, as the post-Civil War era provision was enacted in 1868 to prevent former Confederates from becoming a member of Congress or being elected to other offices.
It’s also the biggest case related to the presidential election that the high court has weighed in on since the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore.
↘ What the liberal justices said
While the court’s three liberal justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the judgment, they disagreed with the conservative majority’s rationale, saying it was unnecessary and went too far:
“The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson wrote. “In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment.”
🏔️ What Colorado’s secretary of state said
“I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates,” Jena Griswold wrote on X. “Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking [insurrectionists] from our ballot.”
🇺🇲 What the ruling means
The highly anticipated ruling provides clarity as to who will appear on the ballot — not just for voters in Colorado on the eve they head to the polls on Super Tuesday, but also in Illinois and Maine, where voters had also petitioned for Trump to be disqualified from the ballot in those states, also citing the insurrection clause.
➡️ How we got here
The case, known as Trump v. Anderson, centers on a so-called insurrection clause of the U.S. Constitution, formally known as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It prohibits officials who have previously sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution from holding government office if they engage in insurrection.
Colorado voters argued that Trump did engage in insurrection on Jan. 6 and therefore should be disqualified from holding office under Section 3.
Trump, however, has not been explicitly charged with “insurrection” in any of the four criminal cases in which he has been indicted.
