The Supreme Court justices expressed doubts about barring Trump.
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The scene outside the Supreme Court today.
The Supreme Court seems ready to hand Donald Trump his first consequential legal victory of the campaign season.
After hearing more than two hours of argument today, the justices signaled that they were likely to overturn a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court removing Trump from that state's presidential ballot under a 157-year-old provision of the 14th Amendment.
The justices seemed generally receptive to the two main points that Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, raised in support of reversing the lower court’s decision: that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office, was not “self-executing” but could only be enforced by a separate act of Congress, and that the provision simply did not apply to presidents.
Significantly, two of the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined their conservative colleagues in suggesting doubts about Colorado’s decision.
Justice Kagan expressed concern that by allowing Trump to be removed from the Colorado ballot, it could set a precedent of giving individual states “extraordinary” power to affect national elections.
Justice Jackson pointed out that the text of the amendment did not explicitly include “president” in the list of offices that could face disqualification for engaging in insurrection. That was because the amendment, she argued, was not initially intended to keep Southern rebels from running for president, but rather to stop them from using their popularity in their home states to seek local offices and get back into power by running for Congress.
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Source: nytimes.com
