Even the most liberal Supreme Court justices could not accept that individual states could exclude Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot, a legal expert has said.
Professor Ray Brescia of Albany Law School told Newsweek that oral arguments in Donald Trump's exclusion case showed that Democrat-appointed justices clearly rejected claims that individual states could exclude federal election candidates.
"It is not surprising that the court ruled the way it did given that, at oral arguments on the case, even the liberal justices seemed quite skeptical," Brescia said.
Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War addition, could not be used to remove Trump from state ballots in the 2024 presidential election. His opponents had argued that his alleged attempts to overturn Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election win made him an insurrectionist under the wording of the 14th Amendment.
During oral arguments on February 8, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—who is the first former federal public defender on the Supreme Court and generally sides with other Democrat-appointed justices—said Section 3 was intended to stop former Confederates from taking state appointments, not the presidency.
Brescia said the justices rejected the argument "that the drafters of the 14th Amendment's Insurrection Clause intended to allow every state to make its own determination on the eligibility of someone seeking election for federal office under that clause."
In doing so, the Supreme Court reversed a Colorado court's decision that determined the former president was ineligible. In a unanimous ruling, the nine Supreme Court justices agreed that an individual state cannot choose who gets to run for the White House.
Newsweek sought email comment from Donald Trump's attorney Tuesday. Trump remains the frontrunner to take the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
During the oral arguments, Jackson, a Biden appointee, said a constitutional ban on insurrectionists taking office was not intended for the presidency.
She told Trump's lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, that she was surprised the historical record was not a major pillar of his arguments for keeping Trump on the Colorado ballot.
Jackson said the historical record shows that the ban on insurrectionists under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was introduced to stop former Confederates from taking positions in state government and then using their positions to reestablish the Confederacy.
"I didn't see any evidence that the presidency was top of mind for the framers when they were drafting section 3, because they were actually dealing with a different issue," Jackson said.
She added: "The pressing concern, as least as I see the historical record, was actually what was going on at lower levels of the government: the possible infiltration and embedding of insurrectionists into the state government apparatus and the real risk that former Confederates might return to power in the South."
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Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more
