The Supreme Court, or SCOTUS, as the current taste for acronyms would have it, has unsurprisingly decided that neither the state of Colorado nor any other state may ban any seeker of federal office from an election ballot.¹
I here reverse my comments on the case in a previous post and say this is a good and right decision.
No matter how he or his supporters spin it, this is emphatically NOT a win for Trump except in the most tangential sense. Nor does it in any way excuse Trump's participation in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and it does not suggest that that event was not an insurrection.
What it is, is a win for the polity that is the United States of America, emphasis on United, and for the American people.
Why, in the first paragraph, did I say this decision was unsurprising? I say that based on the oral arguments² for the case. I'll admit I haven't plowed through all 140 pages of that document--please do, if you have the stamina--but the trend of the justices' questions strongly suggested they would be looking at the role, if any, that individual states can play in national elections. It occurred to me at the time that the overarching consideration the justices had was that all voters in all states have the opportunity to vote for candidates of their choice. Today's decision has assured continuation of the universal suffrage the United States is known for.
Given the downright wackiness of some decisions in recent years, this one was refreshingly commonsensical. The Court's reasoning is straightforward but wordy. Allow me to paraphrase: If any state is allowed unilaterally to remove a person from a ballot for federal office, the residents of that state who might have voted for the excised candidate are effectively disenfranchised and the election itself is invalidated as a national contest since not all eligible voters in all states could cast votes as they wished. The decision further clarifies the rather murky final part of Section 3 of Amendment XIV by determining that only Congress holds the power to remove a federal-office seeker from the federal ballot, and that the decision would be effective equally in all states. Finally, the decision avoids discussion of the events of Jan. 6, 2021, leaving open the possibility of future litigation of the matter.
While states are prohibited from removing valid candidates for federal office from ballots they may still disqualify candidates for state offices.
The decision is clear and well written. While passed unanimously the it has individual non-dissenting opinions by Justices Barrett, Kagan, Jackson and Sotomayor attached. Anyone interested in the Court's internal relationships might find them interesting.
---Diogenes, 4 March 2024
¹ https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/23
² https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcript/2023
These references are to the Supreme Court's website. Cases from this year's term have not yet been published in U. S. Reports, the publication of final record.