U.S. Supreme Court rules states cannot remove Trump from presidential ballot

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling on Monday that former President Donald Trump’s name will remain on the 2024 presidential ballot.

The Supremes’ ruling comes just one day before the Colorado Republican primary as the result of the Colorado Supreme Court decreeing that Trump was ineligible as a result of his purported role in the events that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.

In a decision that illuminated congressional power over the states, the Supreme Court ruled that the “responsibility for enforcing” the 14th Amendment's “insurrection” clause “against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.”

“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing section 3 against all federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the ruling said.

The Court also said that “the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, on its face, does not affirmatively delegate such a power to the States,” and made the argument that if states were allowed to decide which candidates were eligible for ballots, it would create a disproportionate result with some candidates being “declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct.”

The problem would be even more significant if a presidential candidate were found ineligible after some voters cast their votes, adding that, “nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos."

The Court’s ruling overturns the Colorado Supreme Court’s earlier decision that determined Trump was ineligible for the ballot due to the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, which has a clause prohibiting candidates who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office.

The Colorado Supreme Court said Trump violated the 14th Amendment through his purported participation in attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the riotous acts that followed on Jan. 6, 2021.

The media speculated the Supreme Court might rule in Trump's favor last month after both conservative and liberal justices seemed wary of Colorado’s arguments.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a recent Trump appointee wrote in a concurring opinion that she thinks the Court only needed to determine if states have the power to enforce the insurrection clause.

“It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced,” she wrote. “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

The three justices considered ‘liberal’ such as Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor concurred with the majority's judgment but quoted the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion case from 1973.

"If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” the three justices quoted Dobbs in the opening of their concurrence. 

Allowing Colorado to kick Trump off the ballot, “would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles,” they wrote.

The Supreme Court's decision will also impact other states, which also found tried to remove Trump from the ballot.