The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that states including Illinois lack the authority to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The court’s ruling was a direct reversal of a December order by the 4-3 Democratic majority of the Colorado Supreme Court that disqualified Trump from that state’s ballot because the former president engaged in insurrection through his role in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that was aimed at blocking the Electoral College count making Democrat Joe Biden president.
The Colorado court’s finding that the former president had “engaged in insurrection” was used by Cook County Judge Tracie Porter in her Feb. 28 order removing Trump from the March 19 Illinois primary ballot. Porter also had ruled Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was “self executing,” meaning states could act unilaterally to remove Trump from the ballot.
But the U.S. Supreme Court — while not making a determination on whether Trump engaged in insurrection — found otherwise in reversing the Colorado court’s decision.
At issue was Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which states that those who have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution “as an officer of the United States” shall not be able to serve in Congress or “hold any office, civil or military” if they have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution.
“The notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible. The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record),” the high court ruled.
“The ‘patchwork’ that would likely result from state enforcement would ‘sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States’ as a whole,” the ruling said.
In its ruling, a five-member majority of the nine-member court said it was up to Congress and not the states to enforce the “insurrection clause” when it involved federal candidates such as those seeking the presidency.
The court’s three Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, referred to Trump as “an oathbreaking insurrectionist” but agreed that allowing individual states to make their own disqualification decisions “would create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles.” Still, in a separate concurrence, they said the court’s majority went too far in making an act of Congress the enforcement mechanism.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a separate concurrence, appeared to agree with the liberal justices but chided them for their rhetoric.
Trump hailed the ruling, made a day before the Colorado primary, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, calling it a “very important decision” that was “very well crafted.”
“I think it will go a long way toward bringing our country together, which our country needs,” Trump told reporters at a news conference.
“Essentially, you cannot take somebody out of a race because an opponent would like to have it that way,” he said. “The voters can take a person out of the race very quickly. But the court shouldn’t be doing that, and the Supreme Court said that very well.”
Porter’s ruling had made Illinois the third state in the nation to bar the former president from the ballot, along with Colorado and Maine. But Porter had put her ruling on hold and kept Trump on the Illinois ballot pending resolution by the nation’s highest court.
Porter made her decision in an appeal of a bipartisan 8-0 decision by the State Board of Elections on Jan. 30 that rejected efforts backed by the group Free Speech for People to disqualify Trump from the Illinois primary ballot.
Attorneys for the group on Monday called the high court’s decision “disgraceful.”
“The Supreme Court has spoken on constitutional procedure, but its decision does not address or override the clear facts: Donald Trump supported and incited the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol,” attorney Caryn Lederer, who argued the case before Porter, said in a statement.
“This must ring like an alarm to voters. Donald Trump tried to overthrow our democracy; he cannot lead it,” Lederer said.
Following an appeal of Porter’s challenge by Trump’s attorneys, the ballot challenge in Illinois remains before the 1st Appellate Court, which will determine the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Lederer had argued the ballot challenge to Trump also dealt with aspects of Illinois election law that would not be decided by the high court’s ruling on Colorado. She said attorneys will be researching the U.S. Supreme Court ruling and Porter’s ruling to determine what next legal steps, if any, would be pursued.
One issue that was not addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision was Porter’s ruling that the State Board of Elections erred in adopting a legal standard that Trump did not “willfully lie” in signing his statement of candidacy attesting he was qualified for the office of the presidency. Porter ruled Trump “falsely swore” he was “legally qualified’ for the presidency because the Colorado Supreme Court had already ruled that the former president “had been found to engage in insurrection.”
Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, an outspoken critic of Trump and prominent campaign surrogate Biden, said following Monday’s ruling that he believed leaving the former president on the ballot “will help Democrats,” primarily by driving turnout in the November general election.
Porter had rejected arguments by Trump’s attorneys that states lacked the power to act on the “insurrection clause” without authorization from Congress; that the section of the 14th Amendment did not apply to the office of president; and that the former president’s actions on the day of the Capitol riot did not amount to insurrection.
Trump had used Porter’s ruling for fundraising in national emails to supporters,
“I’ve been disqualified from the ballot again! This time in Illinois. THEY WANT ME REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT IN ALL 50 STATES,” said one fundraising email last week. “KEEP TRUMP ON MY BALLOT. It truly means the world to me, and I will always love you for it!”
