<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

In reaching this conclusion, the justices rejected the invitation to reverse an understanding of Section 3 that had prevailed since about the time that provision became part of the Constitution. In effect, the court unanimously rejected a radically revisionist interpretation of Section 3 that came into vogue only after Donald Trump\u2019s election to the presidency in 2016. Rather than lending itself to the attempt to destroy Trump\u2019s candidacy through the weaponization of the law, the court took a measured, common-sense approach to the issues. The essential difference between the justices was not, in any way, explicable on political or partisan grounds. It concerned the question of the extent of \u201cjudicial restraint.\u201d Whether on the majority\u2019s or the concurrences\u2019 vision of judicial restraint, Trump clearly won this case.<\/p>\n

Checking States\u2019 Power<\/h2>\n
The fulcrum of the court\u2019s opinion was that the 14th Amendment, including Section 3, was designed to rebalance the pre-Civil War\u2019s distribution of power between the state and federal governments in favor of the latter. In effect, the amendment revised the original Constitution\u2019s conception of federalism. The court observed that Section 1 of that amendment imposed severe constraints on state powers, while Section 5 gave Congress significant new enforcement authority with regard to the states. Given the overall structure and purpose of the amendment, it would be incongruous to take Section 3 as empowering individual states to disqualify federal officeholders or candidates. (States could still, however, prescribe the qualifications for state office.) Nothing in the language of Section 3 affirmatively delegates such a power to the states, nor does anything in the provisions of Article I of the original Constitution.<\/p>\n
The four justices who wrote separately did not take issue with that core piece of the majority\u2019s reasoning. Justice Barrett wrote, \u201cStates lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates.\u201d Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, affirmed that allowing Colorado to keep Trump off the ballot would \u201ccreate a chaotic state-by-state patchwork\u201d in which different states adopted different standards for evaluating a presidential candidate\u2019s eligibility. <\/p>\n
Sotomayor added: \u201cSection 3 marked the first time that the Constitution placed substantive limits on a State\u2019s authority to choose its own officials. Given that context, it would defy logic for Section 3 to give States new powers to determine who may hold the Presidency.\u201d For these justices too, Colorado\u2019s action was unconstitutional essentially because it violated foundational principles of federal-state relations.<\/p>\n
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Where Justices Differed <\/h2>\n
The disagreement between the justices came down to the majority\u2019s conclusion that \u201cthe Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates.\u201d\u00a0The concurring justices would have left open the possibility of enforcement of Section 3 by methods other than those prescribed by Congress. <\/p>\n
What practical difference would it have made if the court had adopted the narrower reading?\u00a0 Justice Sotomayor\u2019s opinion notes one:\u00a0\u201c[The Court\u2019s opinion] forecloses judicial enforcement of [Section 3], such as might occur when a party is prosecuted by an insurrectionist and raises a defense on that score.\u201d\u00a0In her example, a defendant in a federal criminal case could make the argument that because he was being prosecuted under the authority of a president disqualified for insurrection (or by a U.S. attorney appointed by such a president), the prosecution was invalid.<\/p>\n
But the possibility of disqualification by judicial action alone is ruled out unless Section 3 is applicable to incumbent<\/em> federal officials, not only to candidates<\/em>. And as the court had noted, \u201cnot even [Colorado] contend[s] that the Constitution authorizes States to somehow remove sitting<\/em> federal officeholders who may be violating Section 3.\u201d\u00a0Moreover, why should judicial disqualification apply only to federal executive branch<\/em> officials?\u00a0 Why shouldn\u2019t a private party seek to have an act of Congress voided because it would not have been adopted but for the votes of insurrectionist members of Congress?\u00a0Why shouldn\u2019t a criminal sentence be judicially voidable because it was imposed by an insurrectionist judge?\u00a0Justice Sotomayor seems not to have weighed fully the destabilizing consequences of her suggestion.<\/p>\n
Disregarding the \u2018Insurrectionist\u2019 Smear <\/h2>\n
It is noteworthy that no member of the court reached the question of whether Trump was, in fact, an insurrectionist (though the Sotomayor opinion hinted as much). The court\u2019s holding that Congress must first implement Section 3 with a criminal statute allowed it to avoid defining \u201cinsurrection,\u201d not to mention whether the events of Jan. 6 amounted to one. <\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
The court also avoided the important question of whether the president was an \u201cOfficer of the United States\u201d included in the list of offices for which an insurrectionist could be disqualified, even though the 14th Amendment\u2019s text makes no specific mention of the chief executive. While the court held that the states may not enforce Section 3 (without a delegation of such power from Congress), it leaves it to the political branches to decide these crucial questions.<\/p>\n
SCOTUS Forced to Weigh in on Lawfare Against Trump<\/h2>\n
Another lesson of the Supreme Court\u2019s opinion is the failure (thus far) of the legal effort to prevent Donald Trump from running for reelection in November. Critics no doubt will spin the result as conservative justices siding with Donald Trump, though the unanimous vote to reject the Colorado Supreme Court\u2019s opinion should defuse such claims. <\/p>\n
The decision instead restores the political system\u2019s traditional approach to selecting the president. It rejected a radical effort to replace the normal method of voting in November by allowing state, and ultimately, federal intervention in deciding who the candidates would be. The court did not lean toward Trump or against Biden; instead, it used regular approaches to interpreting the Constitution to settle the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. If the court may have been \u201cconservative,\u201d it was so with a small, not a capital, \u201cC\u201d:\u00a0It was reaffirming the constitutionality of long-established electoral practices.<\/p>\n
This decision finishes off the long-shot effort to transform the 14th Amendment into a tool to block Trump\u2019s reelection.\u00a0But it does not spell the end of the unprecedented effort to use the courts to stop him. Up next will be the court\u2019s review of Special Counsel Jack Smith\u2019s prosecution of Trump for his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In this case, Trump has gone to the justices to grant him absolute immunity from prosecution for his official acts as president. Simply by agreeing to hear the case, with a decision likely by the end of June, the court has delayed the start of the trial until late summer. And that prosecution will face challenges under the court\u2019s existing precedents. For example, Smith has charged Trump with defrauding the United States, which the court has said requires misrepresentations that involve money or property.<\/p>\n
Even though the justices ultimately may not grant Trump a second win on the immunity question, their review of the Jan. 6 charges may well push the end of the prosecution after the November election. That would leave the judgment on Trump\u2019s responsibility for Jan. 6, and whether he committed insurrection, up to the American people to decide at the ballot box \u2014 exactly the way the founders wanted it.<\/p>\n
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Monday\u2019s unanimous Supreme Court decision restoring former President Trump to the Republican primary ballot in Colorado goes a long way toward assuring public confidence in the outcome \u2014 whatever it may be \u2014 of this November\u2019s presidential election. Although the justices disagreed about the scope of the decision \u2014 four justices would have based it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1601,"featured_media":2192735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/jackie-hope-x4Ln13R0c4c-unsplash.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2192734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/jackie-hope-x4Ln13R0c4c-unsplash.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2192734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2192735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2192734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2192734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2192734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}