The Supreme Court is taking its time to review whether to overturn a lower court's decision denying that Trump has presidential immunity, but it saw no reason to delay overturning the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was ineligible to be on the 2024 presidential ballot.
The Court unanimously ruled that states cannot exclude federal candidates from election ballots, concluding that it is Congress's responsibility, not the states', to decide whether a candidate is qualified to be on the ballot for a national election.
The justices' decision was unanimous, but there was disagreement in the interpretation of the 14th Amendment's Section 3, a post-Civil War measure aimed at preventing former insurrectionists from holding office. A five-justice majority consisting of Trump's hand-picked Justices, the highly corrupt and compromised Clarence Thomas, and other far-right Justices, ignored their professed allegiance to states' rights and said the federal government could override Colorado's decision. "The Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates," it wrote.
However, the court's three moderate justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed concerns over the majority's approach, arguing it extended beyond the necessary scope of the decision. "The court today needed to resolve only a single question: whether an individual state may keep a presidential candidate found to have engaged in insurrection off its ballot," they wrote in a joint concurring opinion. "The majority resolves much more than the case before us."
But even though there was some disagreement among the justices, Justice Amy Coney Barrett urged the everyone to simmer down. From The New York Times:
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a brief concurring opinion, agreed that the majority had gone too far, saying that it should not have addressed "the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced."
But she urged the public to focus on what was common ground among the justices.
"This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency," she wrote. "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."
"For present purposes," Justice Barrett wrote, "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."
