The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that former President Donald Trump will not be removed from presidential ballots due to a previous court’s ruling that determined he “engaged in insurrection” on January 6, 2021.
SCOTUS unanimously voted to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision in the case Trump v. Anderson to remove the former president from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that anyone who took an oath to the U.S. Constitution is ineligible to hold office if they “engaged in insurrection.”
The unsigned ruling from SCOTUS states that the federal government has the power to remove a presidential candidate due to a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the states are not allowed to issue their own rulings in such matters.
“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” reads the ruling.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett released her own concurring opinion on the ruling, stating that the Court “settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election.”
“Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home,” she wrote.
Similarly, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson released a joint opinion on the ruling, writing that preventing Trump from appearing on the ballot would “create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles.”
“Our Constitution leaves some questions to the States while committing others to the Federal Government. Federalism principles embedded in that constitutional structure decide this case. States cannot use their control over the ballot to ‘undermine the National Government,’” they added in their opinion.
This ruling comes as multiple states have attempted to remove the former president for allegedly violating the Fourteenth Amendment, with both Illinois and Maine also attempting to rule Trump ineligible to appear on their ballots, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The Illinois ruling was promptly placed on hold by a state judge until SCOTUS ruled in the Colorado case, with the state judge saying that votes for Trump would “be suppressed” if SCOTUS ruled in favor of Colorado.
Trump is now expected to appear on ballots in all three states.
