Neil Gorsuch Could Strike the Death Knell for Donald Trump

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Donald Trump nominee, is likely to face significant pressure should the former president appeal the Colorado Supreme Court's Tuesday decision that disqualified him from the 2024 ballot in the state.

The decision is the first by a U.S. court to find Trump ineligible to run for office again because of his involvement in the January 6 storming of the Capitol. A majority of the Colorado justices ruled in a 4-3 decision that the former president "is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment." Those four justices were all appointed by Democratic governors.

Crucially, the historic decision referenced a previous ruling by Gorsuch, before he became a SCOTUS justice, which found that "a state's legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office."

The case was about a naturalized American citizen, Abdul Karim Hassan, who wanted to run for the presidency, but was prevented from being placed on the ballot by the Constitution's natural-born citizen requirement.

This could prove tricky for Gorsuch once Trump's lawyers appeal the Colorado's decision to the Supreme Court, as they vowed to on Tuesday.

Talking on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes, attorney and justice correspondent at The Nation Elie Mystal said he expects the Supreme Court's conservative majority to overturn Colorado's decision—though this might be awkward for Gorsuch as it would force him to go against his own previous opinion.

"Of course the Supreme Court is going to weigh in and likely overturn the Colorado state Supreme Court's interpretation of Colorado state law [...] but," Mystal said on Tuesday.

"I would like to point out that they [the Colorado Supreme Court's justices] were so aware of what SCOTUS was about to do in terms of bending over backwards, that they literally quote Neil Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch when he was sitting in the federal circuit in Colorado—they quote Gorsuch for the opinion that Colorado gets to decide its own rules about who's qualified or not for ballot in Colorado," he continued.

"That's a Gorsuch opinion that they quote in the thing, so if Gorsuch had any logical consistency he would likely uphold the Colorado state court's opinion, but what we're about to see if just how again hypocritical and unserious this Supreme Court is when it comes to protecting their partisan sugar daddies like Donald Trump."

Newsweek contacted the Supreme Court for comment by email on Wednesday.

According to Mystal and other observers, this reference was included to maximize pressure on the Supreme Court's conservative justices, three of whom—Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—were nominated by Trump. There's also a chance that Gorsuch, in order to be consistent, will decide in favor of Colorado's top court's decision.