Haste and Acrimony Undermine a Unanimous Supreme Court in Trump-Eligibility Case

The Supreme Court this morning put an end to court challenges to Donald Trump’s qualification for the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It did so the day before the Super Tuesday primaries in Colorado and Maine, two states that have sought to bar Trump from the ballot. Not one justice thought that Colorado had the power to do what it did in a decision full of elastic reasoning. Only the most deluded figures of the legal “Resistance” ever believed this gambit would work.

The Court was right to reverse Colorado’s decision, but the Court got the law wrong, and all nine justices shirked their duty to finally adjudicate whether Trump is covered by Section 3 and whether he engaged in insurrection — both matters the Court could have resolved by clearly construing the legal terms of Section 3, and without a detailed dive into the evidentiary record. The three liberal justices, in a concurrence penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, instead argued for leaving disqualification hanging like a sword of Damocles over a Trump presidency, to be deployed at a time of his enemies’ choosing.