Former President Donald Trump formally appealed on Wednesday a Colorado Supreme Court decision that found him disqualified from the presidency, further pushing the nation’s highest court to rule on an otherwise untested constitutional amendment and possibly upend the 2024 election.
The case challenges Trump’s eligibility for office under the insurrection clause of the Civil War-era 14th Amendment to the U.S. Consitution. The Colorado Supreme Court found last month that it applied to Trump and he’s thus disqualified from office and the state’s ballot.
But the 4-3 majority opinion allowed Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, to remain on the ballot for Colorado’s March 5 presidential primary election in the event of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
All the parties involved have now urged the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the matter, and quickly. Given the stakes, most legal observers expect the high court to take on questions it has never before answered.
“The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” Trump’s legal team wrote in its appeal.
The court’s December ruling was the first in the nation to find then-President Trump engaged in insurrection for his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by a mob of his supporters that disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The court also found that the president, having taken an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, was covered by the 14th Amendment’s provision barring insurrectionists from office.
It immediately set off a political firestorm. Similar legal challenges had been launched in other states but failed to gain much traction. But shortly after the Colorado decision, the ruling was among the citations used by Maine’s secretary of state to bar Trump from the ballot there.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on that section of the 14th Amendment. If a majority of justices agree with the Colorado court’s decision, Trump could effectively be barred from the presidency.
“Democrats are obsessively violating the American voters’ Constitutional right to vote for the candidate of their choice,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement shortly after the appeal was filed. “This is an un-American, unconstitutional act of election interference which cannot stand. We urge a clear, summary rejection of the Colorado Supreme Court’s wrongful ruling and the execution of a free and fair election this November.”
Trump’s appeal rejected the Colorado court’s decision on several counts, arguing that it’s up to Congress, not the courts, to establish qualification for the presidency; the president isn’t included in the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment; and, even if it were, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were not an insurrection and Trump did not engage in any such conduct.
The lawsuit was first brought in September by a group of unaffiliated and Republican Colorado voters. They’re represented by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They won a partial victory in Denver District Court, where, after a five-day trial, a judge found Trump engaged in insurrection, but lost the argument that the 14th Amendment applied to the presidency. They won on both fronts at the state’s high court.
The Colorado Republican Party was the first group to appeal the state court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to arguments made by Trump’s legal team, the state party argues the Colorado ruling would violate its First Amendment right to choose its political candidates. The party also notes that Trump has not been charged with the specific crime of insurrection, much less convicted. The state GOP is represented in part by Jay Sekulow, who represented Trump during his first impeachment proceedings.
“While there may be limited circumstances not at issue here in which a state official might properly adjudicate straightforward, nonpolitical matters like age or residency, the First Amendment surely does not permit state authorities to go beyond and determine the complex, political question of insurrection,” the Colorado Republican Party’s appeal states.
In response to the Colorado Republican Party’s appeal, the voters who brought the original lawsuit likewise urged the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the matter and to do so quickly.
The matter is simply too important, and too pressing, to let it linger, they argued.
“Whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a former President (and current presidential primary front-runner) who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution from holding office again is a question of paramount national importance,” they wrote in their brief to the nation’s high court. “Because 2024 presidential primary elections are imminent, there is no time or need to let these issues percolate further.”
Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who is the actual named defendant in the case as the person charged with putting candidates on the ballot, likewise encouraged the courts to take up the matter. It’s up to her to place only qualified candidates on the ballot, but, in cases where it’s not clear-cut, she seeks guidance from the courts on their eligibility. While the second-term Democrat is an ardent critic of the former president and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, she has taken no official position on excluding him from the ballot.
“This Court’s resolution of the matter is important to ensure that all Coloradans’ votes are cast only for candidates who are qualified to hold the office of president,” Griswold wrote in a brief supporting review.
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