In unanimously ruling that Donald Trump could not be barred from the presidential ballot in Colorado, the Supreme Court sent a clear and stern message that individuals and states “have no role to play” in deciding which candidates can be in contention for president.
Those comments were made by Jordan Sekulow, who serves as the American Center for Law & Justice’s executive director, to Newsmax Tuesday. Sekulow, who represented the Colorado Republican Party in the high court case, explained:
“All nine justices agreed with the decision that the states have no role to play and state actors like secretaries of states or some of these administrative bodies, like boards of education, have no role to play in removing a presidential candidate from the ballot or a federal candidate from the ballot.”
The court was also clear that states aren’t able to invoke a provision put in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that bars people who have committed insurrection from holding high political office — if they don’t first have action from federal courts or Congress.
This is not what Colorado did. It decided to remove Trump based on a lawsuit filed by various groups, without any action from Congress or other courts. As Sekulow said:
“[Colorado’s move] was a conspiracy to remove Donald Trump from the ballot. We just won this one, and we won it big … these elected officials who did this should lose their elections. This was embarrassing for these Colorado election officials or the judges who thought they could somehow ban a presidential candidate from their state courthouse.”
Groups that filed the case in Colorado — and those that filed similar cases in other states — said that since Trump committed insurrection for his role in the January 6, 2021, attacks at the U.S. Capitol, he should be barred from holding political office.
However, not only has Trump not been convicted of insurrection, he hasn’t even been charged with it.
The other major issue at hand in this case was whether an individual state had the right to bar a candidate from the presidential ballot. Colorado and Maine did that, but many other states that had similar lawsuits filed didn’t do so.
So, if individual states had a right to make their own choice, it could’ve caused chaos — with Trump appearing on the ballots in some states but not others.
As a result, Sekulow said he was “very excited” that the high court’s decision came back unanimous. He said:
“You can kind of shove that right back in the face of any liberal friends you have and say, ‘Listen, there are ways to remove bad presidents, and there are even ways to remove potentially bad candidates.’
“The court said that yesterday, but the way to do that is not going randomly from state to state and creating, as the three liberal justices wrote as well in their concurrence, national chaos, which is what this would have done.”
