Supreme Court nullifies key part of 14th Amendment, keeping Trump on ballot

Demonstrators in front of SCOTUS make their viewpoint clear. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

WASHINGTON—In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave indicted, rapist and twice-impeached Republican former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump a big win, declaring that Colorado—and every other state—could not keep the serial sexual predator and con man off the presidential ballot because he aided and abetted the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

This latest ruling adds to the Supreme Court’s history of fast-tracking decisions that help Trump while slow tracking any cases that might hurt him.

There is growing fear now after this ruling, especially with the court’s five right-wing justices on it—including three Trump named—could foreshadow another big Trump win in four months: Granting him and any ex-president immunity forever from federal criminal prosecution.

Only Congress can set the conditions for the drastic move of bumping Trump off ballots, six Republican-named justices added, by laying down the law to the states on exactly how they must proceed in tossing federal officials off their ballots, now and forever.

Even then, those laws don’t apply to the president, the majority said. That’s because the Constitution, in the provision the Coloradans used, doesn’t specifically name the president and the vice president as “officers under the United States” and subject to its ban on office-holding by rebels.

The ruling essentially renders the 14th Amendment, which says a person who violates an oath to preserve the Constitution loses eligibility for federal office. Democratic-named justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed Colorado couldn’t toss Trump, but said the other justices went too far by prescribing Congress must write a law—dotting the “I”s and crossing the “T”s in so many words—telling states how to throw presidential hopefuls off ballots.

One of the right-wing justices, Amy Coney Barrett, agreed that the conservative justices went too far with their musings about how a person could be kept off the ballot in states but said that since this is an election case the justices should be turning down rather than raising the temperature in the country. That reasoning, of course, had no effect on her decision to kill Roe, a decision that caused a firestorm that is still sweeping the nation, not to mention the deaths of many women denied healthcare as a result.

It does not take a law degree to understand that it is the job of the Supreme Court to make sure that the Constitution is adhered to. In the famous Brown v Board of Education decision that protected the Constitution by ending segregation in public schools also created a firestorm of opposition from right wingers and racists. Nevertheless it was protection of the constitution, not concern about whether the temperature of the national dialogue would go up, that motivated the justices at the time.

The High Court’s ruling left the effort to knock Trump out of this year’s race judicially in tatters. It has essentially destroyed the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office just as a right wing dominated court has weakened and practically destroyed the Voting Rights Act and of course recently, for the first time in history, removed from the people a constitutional right – the right to have an abortion and control one’s own body.

Maine’s Secretary of State had planned to knock out Trump, too, from her state’s primary, but held her hand until the High Court ruled. And a Cook County (Chicago) Circuit Judge ruled on  February 28 that Illinois could toss Trump off the state’s March 19 primary ballot.  Those efforts are now dead.

That’s even though Trump, on February 8, admitted the 2021 coup try was “an insurrection.”  But he shunned responsibility for it—despite his own pre-combat orders to the insurrectionists: “Be There! Will be wild!” in a tweet, and an incendiary speech urging them on to invade the U.S. Capitol.

The six complaining Coloradans, via their Supreme Court majority and their Secretary of State, cited the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “any officers under the United States” from holding office ever again if they took oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and then violated them by aiding in insurrections or rebellions. That ban applied to Trump, they said.

The justices—all nine—said it didn’t. The 14th Amendment, which contains the ban, doesn’t name the president and vice president as being “officers under the United States.”

The decision is important not just for itself. It could foreshadow the outcome in another looming Trump case, which the justices brought upon themselves: Deciding his claim that any president, past or present, enjoys complete and perpetual immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump lost that case on appeal in the D.C. Appeals Court but the Supreme Court took the case anyway when he asked them to do so.

The justices will hear oral arguments on that case during the week of April 22, with a ruling expected by July 1.

The immunity defense has stalled the criminal trials of Trump in federal court, especially in D.C., on cases arising out of the insurrection.

Jack Smith’s case on hold

That case, by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, is on hold pending the High Court’s decision. Both U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C., and the U.S. appeals court there, unanimously, have said the case should proceed.

Just the sheer delay, plus delays for filing briefs, taking witness statements and the like could push it beyond the 2024 election.

And if Trump wins in November despite his record of serial sexual harassment, 91 criminal counts in four courts, disclosure of secret papers such as a Pentagon plan to invade Iran to unauthorized people, and his deprivation of people’s right to vote—a key charge in Smith’s D.C. case–Trump could in essence pardon himself by ordering his Justice Department next January to drop the federal cases.

They’d be dropped anyway, if the justices rule for Trump on his perpetual immunity claim.

Keeping Trump on state ballots, as he coasts to the Republican presidential nomination and a rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden, also would leave Trump free-should he beat Biden—to implement his 2025 plan to become a dictator.

He says it would only be on the first day. Nobody, including Biden and Trump’s supporters, believes that. Indeed, public polling of the Trumpites show a majority welcome his dictatorship.

And that dictatorship would include a crackdown on unions and organized labor, a ban on raising the minimum wage, non-enforcement or worse of job safety and health laws and a wide range of other anti-worker measures Trump’s aides sought in his 2017-21 term in the Oval Office.

All this can be prevented only if voters arise in indignation against Trump’s dictatorial plans and the enthusiastic support he gets for them from both Republican officeholders and rank-and-file MAGAites.

“The men who drafted and ratified the 14th Amendment witnessed an ‘insurrection [and] rebellion’ to defend slavery,” Justices Kagan, Brown Jackson and Sotomayor said in agreeing with the majority’s decision—but only on applying it to Colorado.

In the amendment’s Section 3, the crafters “wanted to ensure those who had participated in that insurrection, and in possible future insurrections, could not return to prominent roles. Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section3 can bar an oath-breaking insurrectionist from becoming president.

“Although we agree Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision. Because we would decide only the issue before us, we concur” with the basic ruling against Colorado, they said, and that’s all.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.