Politics is becoming the new prose with plot twists happening left and right ahead of next year’s presidential election. On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from running in the 2024 presidential election.
“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” per the court’s ruling.
As it applies to the presidency, under the “insurrection” clause of the Constitution: “No person shall be… President…who, having previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
In a 4-3 ruling, the justices concluded that the January 6 capitol riot classified as an insurrection and that Trump “engaged in” said insurrection. The 134-page opinion, reads in part, “President Trump incited and encouraged the use of violence and lawless action to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”
Colorado isn’t the only state with a case around Trump’s eligibility. Lawsuits have been filed in more than 25 other U.S. states. Lawsuits in both Minnesota and New Hampshire were dismissed because of procedural issues. Last month, a Michigan judge said this was a political issue, and an appeals court upheld the decision to refrain from disqualifying Trump. Thus far, Colorado is the first decision to find Trump in violation of the Constitution.
Trump’s spokesperson has already indicated that his legal team will be filing an appeal. And the Colorado case could possibly proceed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If the justices do add this case to their docket, it will be joining “a pile of other Trump-related matters they have agreed or are likely to decide, including whether he is immune from criminal prosecution for actions he took in office and the scope of an obstruction charge that is central to his federal Jan. 6 case,” The New York Times reports.
But even a judgment by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the lower court’s ruling still leaves Trump’s eligibility in question. As University of Michigan law professor Richard Friedman posits, “Does the court make a nationwide determination that Trump is ineligible, or does it merely say that a decision like Colorado’s is justifiable, and leave it to the processes of each state?”
Richard L. Hasen, an expertise in election law at the University of California, Los Angeles, has likened the current state of affairs to Bush v. Gore. “Once again, the Supreme Court is being thrust into the center of a U.S. presidential election,” Hasen stated. “But, unlike in 2000, the general political instability in the United States makes the situation now much more precarious.”