Even before the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump v. Anderson, many predicted that SCOTUS would overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that declared Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot — and not because the court has a conservative majority. Legal experts predicted a unanimous ruling for obvious reasons.
Most states rejected the legal efforts to boot Trump from the ballot. The idea that states could individually determine the eligibility of candidates would create a constitutional crisis in which voters in select states would be denied the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice while others would not. The courts would officially become battlegrounds in every election.
Sure enough, experts on both sides of the aisle predicted that the Supreme Court would unanimously settle the issue in Trump’s favor, and anyone who watched the oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson last month knew that it was at least going to be 8-1, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor the likely holdout. In the end, she couldn’t bear to humiliate herself that way, and the vote was unanimous.
As you may recall, I expected she’d dissent. I’m glad I was wrong. The efforts to boot Trump off the ballot based on the idea that he was guilty of a crime he has never been tried for or convicted of were anti-democratic in every sense. And ironically, it’s the political left that fancies itself the great defender of democracy.
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The court’s ruling also made it clear that Congress can’t attempt to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment after the election if Trump wins in November.
"The disruption would be all the more acute — and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result — if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the nation has voted,” the court’s ruling reads. "Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration."
Polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Democrats supported the efforts to boot Trump off the ballot, and you can imagine the outrage on social media right now. But as Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her concurring opinion, the unanimous ruling should serve as a clear message that it’s time for the country to move on from this.
"In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has 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,” Barrett wrote. "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."
In their own concurring opinion, the leftist wing of the court agreed that allowing Colorado and other states to individually determine eligibility would create "chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles."
While liberals are furious now, perhaps in time they’ll realize that this was the right decision. In the meantime, they have to settle for the fact that if they want to beat Trump, they’ll have to beat him at the ballot box. One would think that those who claim to love democracy so much would be okay with that.
