\SCOTUSBlog
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states cannot disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices held that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy, against candidates for federal offices.
All nine justices agreed that Colorado cannot remove Trump from the ballot. But four justices – Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a separate opinion and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a joint opinion – argued that their colleagues should have stopped there and not decided anything more.
The court’s decision comes just one day before Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory will hold their primary elections. Trump currently holds an overwhelming lead in the race for the Republican nomination.
The dispute leading to Monday’s opinion began last year in a state court in Colorado. A group of voters in that state argued that Trump was ineligible to appear on the ballot under Section 3, which provides (as relevant here) that no one “shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State,” if that person had previously sworn, “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States,” to support the Constitution but then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the federal government.
A state trial court concluded that Trump had “engaged in insurrection,” but it rejected the voters’ request to remove him from the ballot. The presidency, that court ruled, is not an “office … under the United States,” and the president is not an “officer of the United States.”
The voters appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, which agreed that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot under Section 3. But that court put its ruling on hold to give Trump time to go to the Supreme Court, which agreed early this year to weigh in.
In a 13-page unsigned opinion released shortly after 10 a.m., the justices reversed the state supreme court’s decision.
