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The US Supreme Court has ruled Donald Trump can remain on the presidential primary ballot in Colorado, handing the former president a crucial legal win as he mounts another bid for the White House.
The unanimous ruling on Monday overturned a decision from Colorado’s highest court that found the former president was not qualified to hold office because he had engaged in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The ruling came a day before Super Tuesday, when Colorado will be among 15 states and one territory holding votes in the Republican presidential primaries. Trump is his party’s clear frontrunner, making the White House campaign this year a likely rematch between him and President Joe Biden.
The court wrote that states might have the power to disqualify individuals holding or running for state office. However, they did not have the authority under the US constitution to enforce the legal provision Colorado had used to disqualify Trump “with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency”, the justices wrote in an unsigned decision.
In a social media post following the ruling, Trump said: “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!”.
He also hailed the ruling in a statement from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “You cannot take somebody out of a race. The voters can take a person out of the race very quickly, but a court shouldn’t be doing that and the Supreme Court saw that very well,” Trump told reporters.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-profit legal watchdog that represented voters who challenged Trump in lower Colorado courts, on Monday said the high court had “failed to meet the moment”.
The decision undercuts a legal strategy pursued by activist groups and voters in several states to throw Trump off their ballots based on his alleged violation of section three of the 14th amendment, a civil war-era measure that bars officers who have engaged in rebellion or insurrection from holding office. Officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois had all disqualified him on this basis.
The Supreme Court, however, on Monday said “nothing in the constitution delegates to the states any power to enforce section three against federal officeholders and candidates”.
This case marked the first time the high court addressed how a legal principle originally aimed at keeping Confederates from holding office applied to the eligibility of present-day presidential candidates. Congress should pass legislation first before section three could be enforced, the court wrote.
But four of the nine justices argued separately that while they agreed with the outcome, the ruling had gone beyond the confines of the Colorado case, which they said did not present the question of how section three should be implemented at the federal level.
In one concurring opinion, the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — wrote: “These musings are as inadequately supported as they are gratuitous.”
The “majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”, they added. “In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.”
Amy Coney Barrett, one of the court’s six conservatives and one of three justices nominated by Trump, also addressed this matter. She wrote separately to say the case did not require the court to address whether federal legislation is the “exclusive vehicle” to enforce section three.
“The court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a presidential election,” Coney Barrett 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 Colorado case was initially brought by a group of voters in the state who argued Trump had engaged in insurrection on January 6 2021, when a group of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory in presidential polls. The state’s highest court agreed in a closely divided ruling, and said Trump was disqualified from appearing on its primary ballot. He appealed against that to the US Supreme Court, arguing it had been wrongly decided.
This was the most high-profile electoral case before the Supreme Court since Bush vs Gore, a controversial decision that in 2000 in effect sealed the presidential win for George W Bush after a recount in the state of Florida was blocked.
The Colorado case put the court at the heart of politically sensitive proceedings as it faces criticisms of partisanship after handing down decisions along ideological lines.
Last week the high court also decided to hear Trump’s appeal on whether presidential immunity shields him from prosecution for acts committed while in office. His request stems from a federal indictment that has accused of him of seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Arguments in that case are set for the week of April 22.
Trump on Monday argued he should be granted full immunity.
“If a president doesn’t have full immunity, you really don’t have a president because nobody that is serving in that office will have the courage to make, in many cases, what would be the right decision — or it could be the wrong decision,” he said.
“They have to make decisions and they have to make them free of all terror that can be rained upon them when they leave office.”
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