Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Image of the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C.
By Liliana Stinson ’27
Contributing Writer
In a historic case, the United States Supreme Court will decide whether or not presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump is eligible to remain on the 2024 ballot due to having “engaged in insurrection.”
On Feb. 8, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Trump v. Anderson, in which the Colorado State Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that Trump is “disqualified from holding the office of President,” as he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Specifically, this section broadly disqualifies anyone who engaged in insurrection “having previously taken an oath … to support the federal Constitution” from taking office.
The implications of this particular case are massive — according to Mount Holyoke College President and noted legal scholar Danielle Holley, “We are facing … probably three major Supreme Court cases all surrounding the 2024 election, and many think that Trump v. Anderson is the most consequential election case since Bush versus Gore in 2000."
Additionally, this upcoming case marks the first time the Jan. 6 insurrection has been brought before the Supreme Court, and any ruling on the matter will subsequently influence the other ongoing cases surrounding Trump’s attempts to overrule the 2020 election.
This case originated in early September 2023 with the Anderson litigants — a group of registered Republican voters in Colorado who sought to bar Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, arguing that he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
In November, the Denver District Court found Trump guilty of insurrection but ruled that the office of the president was not subject to Section 3. Per the Denver District Court’s Final Order from November, citing language in the remainder of the constitution, the presidency is not an “office . . . under the United States” nor is the president “an officer of the United States” who had “previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the United States.”
However, on Dec. 19, 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed the latter half of the trial court’s ruling, explaining that the historical intentions of Section 3 — to ensure former Confederates could not hold civil or military office — undoubtedly applies to the president. In the majority’s opinion, there is no reason Section 3 would exclude the highest office in the United States.
Due to the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, Trump was disqualified from remaining on the Colorado Republican primary ballot. In the wake of this decision, Trump has been removed from the Maine primary ballot, and at least 11 other states have introduced Section 3 litigation seeking to disqualify Trump as well. However, as SCOTUS accepted Trump’s petition for the Court to review the case, it can now reverse the Colorado ruling and decide the applications of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, likely determining the future of Trump’s second presidential bid.
The Trump argument is largely based on semantics, citing three primary linguistic reasons why Section 3 should not apply to the former president. Under their interpretation, a president should not be subject to Section 3, as he is not “an officer of the United States” and did not take an oath to “support the Constitution,” as the Constitutional language related to the president is slightly different.
Trump’s legal team adds that even if Section 3 applied, it would only take effect if Congress first enacted “appropriate legislation” enabling Section 3 and outlining the legal process for its application. Lastly, the Trump argument declares that Section 3 would only disqualify Trump “during the time that he holds office” since it says nothing about candidates for office, therefore, he should be allowed on the ballot.
There is no way to know how SCOTUS justices will receive Trump’s argument. Although as Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College Joanna Wuest told Mount Holyoke News, “if the Supreme Court decides in favor of that particular reading of Section 3 of the 14th Amendments, that will do some serious damage to a very kind of clear purpose built into the 14th Amendment.”
Beyond crucially limiting the number of checks and balances put on executive power, Wuest noted, any ruling in favor of exempting the president from Section 3 could introduce some contradictions,
“It'll be particularly ironic if the conservatives who often champion … an originalist understanding of the Constitution … say something in this case [that is] very at odds with a very clear historical meaning of that particular clause,” Wuest said.
Along with dissecting Section 3, Trump's legal argument asserts he did not incite or “engage in insurrection,” and that the president cannot physically engage in insurrection on the basis that “as head of government … anything that he does [is] in furtherance of the wishes of the of the best interests of the United States,” President Holley explained.
Lastly, Trump’s legal team presents some procedural arguments, including that the Colorado Supreme Court had no authority to interfere in the election process. All of Trump’s legal defenses are refuted by the argument of the Anderson litigants and were rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court.
Several potential issues arise from this case, many relating to the inherently political nature of deciding Donald Trump’s eligibility for candidacy. Despite the seemingly complex nature of this case, “arguably, this should be a case that courts should do very well. … They're doing a pure reading of the law, and they're doing it as an issue of first impression. They don't have to incorporate a lot of other case law into their findings; it should be a very straightforward case,” President Holley said. However, “I have a feeling that … it will be difficult for Court onlookers and for the Court itself to really disentangle the impact [of the case] from what they're being asked to do, which is a very straightforward — in many ways — task of constitutional interpretation.”
Additionally, several SCOTUS justices are politically tied to this case. Besides the fact that Trump appointed three of the six current conservative justices, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, attended the rally before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and significantly colluded with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to The New Yorker. Per the Supreme Court’s new Code of Conduct, this fact should have led Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the case, according to The Hill. However, he has made no moves to do so.
“I think Clarence Thomas knows that he doesn't have to listen to anybody. He has a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. [And] he has a lot of powerful backers in the fringe of the Republican Party, and powerful conservative donor networks even in the establishment of the … modern right wing,” Wuest said, summarizing the growing questions surrounding Thomas’s ethics.
President Holley shared similar sentiments on the ethics issues and the overturning of precedent.
“[T]he approval ratings for the Supreme Court are lower than they have been in the last 40 years,” Holley said, with some constituents holding a “strong feeling that the work that [SCOTUS is] doing is motivated by partisanship and not by belief in the rule of law or interpretation of the Constitution.”
If the Court remains faithful to precedent, it may consider the question of insurrection as fact. “In this case, there was a trial where the court actually made a factual finding that he engaged in insurrection,” Holley said. “Typically, the Supreme Court does not disturb factual findings.”
However, due to the intricacies of this case, there is some chance that the Court will disagree on whether the events of Jan. 6 constituted a larger attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, or what steps it may — or may not — take to legitimize its ruling, this case will have massive implications that will impact the presidential election, whether it disqualifies or re-qualifies Trump to remain on the ballot.
“Obviously, if the Supreme Court rules … in favor of Anderson, it would apply nationwide and … there might be other states who would find that the former president is disqualified because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” President Holley said. “Of course, if the former president wins at the Supreme Court, then it would mean that all states must allow him on the ballot without disqualifying him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”
With two other potential pending Supreme Court cases concerning Trump and the insurrection — one regarding presidential immunity and the other related to the use of Sarbanes-Oxley, a statute largely related to financial crimes, in the persecution of Jan. 6 participants — as well as a myriad of criminal charges, the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson is all the more consequential.
“There are multiple lanes in which the Supreme Court will be directly involved in the process and outcome of the 2024 presidential election,” President Holley said. All eyes and ears will be on the Court as they hear legal arguments concerning the former president for the very first — but certainly not the last — time.