The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Thursday morning in the high-stakes case that could decide whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president this year.
唐納德·J·特朗普訴諾瑪·安德森等人案件是在去年六名科羅拉多州選民提起訴訟後發生的，他們指控特朗普根據憲法第十四修正案中很少使用的條款沒有資格競選President. This provision states that any member or official of the United States Congress who takes an oath to defend the Constitution but subsequently participates in an insurrection will be barred from holding public office. A ban must be overturned by a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress.
Colorado voters claimed in a lawsuit filed in state court last year that Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack disqualified him from holding federal office. After a five-day trial, a judge found that Trump participated in the insurrection but was not an “official of the United States” and refused to remove him from the ballot. In December, the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to overturn that ruling and bar him from the ballot. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in January.
While there have been several lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so so far. A Maine judge last month ordered the state’s secretary of state to put Trump on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court rules.
The decision upholding the Colorado Supreme Court ruling would not automatically remove Trump from ballots across the country. While some states have rejected efforts to remove Trump from the primary, the Supreme Court said Trump can be disqualified, which could set off a rapid series of challenges in state and other courts to remove him from the general election ballot. qualifications.
Trump is widely believed to have the upper hand on the Supreme Court, with conservatives holding a 6-3 supermajority and Trump nominating three justices. Still, experts say there remains a large degree of uncertainty about what exactly the court will do because it has chosen not to limit the scope of its debate on these unprecedented issues.
Trump’s lawyers claimed in a brief to the Supreme Court that there would be “chaos and chaos” in the United States if a leading presidential candidate was blocked from the ballot. They presented a series of reasons to the judge as to why he should not be disqualified, including that the term “officer” does not apply to the president and that he did not take part in the insurrection.
“In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people’, [and] For the sake of the people, the American people — not the courts or election officials — should choose the next President of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “
Colorado voters, backed by the left-leaning nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (Crew) in Washington, believe the claim that the 14th Amendment does not apply to the presidency is absurd and that failure to do so would be a danger to democracy. Let him serve again.
Newsletter Promotion Post
“Section 3 is designed precisely to prevent oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump from once again having the power to unleash such chaos,” they wrote. “No one, not even a former president, is above the law. “
The case has no legal precedent – and the justices will discuss key issues in the case, including whether Trump first carried out the insurrection on January 6. The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted after the Civil War to bar former members of the Confederacy from holding public office, but has never been used to bar presidential candidates. In 2022, the amendment was used to remove a New Mexico county commissioner from office, the first time it had been used in this way in a century.
The case marks the Supreme Court’s most direct intervention in a presidential election since its controversial ruling in Bush v. Gore in 2000. Courts are typically reluctant to get involved in heated political disputes in order to maintain their reputation as apolitical institutions, but the Trump case makes it inevitable that the courts will get involved in the most contentious political cases. Public confidence in the courts continues to decline due to a series of ethics scandals and politically charged decisions.
