By Sophie Foster
Opinion Editor
The Supreme Court, it seems, is gearing up to reject several states’ attempts to remove former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot this November.
According to PBS, efforts to prevent Trump’s name from appearing on the ballot altogether have been taken by states such as Maine and Colorado, citing endeavors on the former head of state’s part in trying to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to current President Joe Biden. States expressed alarm at the implications of allowing a candidate to run who apparently encouraged an insurrection, leading to the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 pending President Biden’s inauguration.
These moves against Trump from some states brought the issue to the Supreme Court, in which right wing and Republican-backed justices outnumber their left-wing counterparts 6 to 3, according to Axios. Three of those judges — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were appointed by Trump himself.
Keeping all of that in mind, it stands to reason that the cards in this conversation are visibly stacked in Trump’s favor.
According to NBC, on Thursday, Feb. 8, “the Supreme Court…signaled deep skepticism that Colorado had the power to remove former President Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot” and numerous justices hold the perspective that “states do not have a role in deciding whether a presidential candidate can be barred from running under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that bars people who ‘engaged in insurrection’ from holding office.”
If states do not have this right, though, the obvious question is: who does? The answer, if one were to ask many members of the Supreme Court, is Congress, not individual states.
The amendment, which was put in place after the Civil War to prevent former confederates from regaining political power, explicitly states that “anyone who had previously served as an ‘officer of the United States’ and was then involved in an insurrection would be barred from holding federal office,” according to NBC.
It seems likely that the Supreme Court will stand with Trump on the matter of states barring him from the election this year, and doing so would likely leave the power to prevent a second Trump presidency resting squarely at the feet of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, one of which has a Republican majority.
Bearing all of this in mind, it seems almost certain that Trump will retain his ability to run for president again this year, despite the fact that said ability is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
It is also highly possible that he stands a chance at winning the presidency come November. President Biden, the incumbent and probable Democratic nominee, is wildly unpopular among voters, including those within his own party, many of whom feel he has failed to address most of his campaign promises and has been overly involved in providing weaponry to Israel in recent months, according to previous Elm coverage.
Ultimately, the issue at hand here is not necessarily whether Trump should be allowed to run for office or not, or what the probability is for each candidate to secure the most votes in November. In all actuality, the issue is whether legislators and justices at the federal level should have the power to entirely reject standards stated plainly and directly by the constitutional framework that defines American democracy.
A Supreme Court ruling against Trump and in favor of states working to remove him from ballots, while unlikely, would do little to prevent the nation’s continued barreling toward conservative extremism at the federal level — realistically, it would be a marginally meaningful statement at best.
A Supreme Court ruling in favor of Trump, coupled with Congressional inaction to prevent his campaign from concluding with his name on ballots, however, would functionally represent a belief that our elected officials should not inherently be held to the Constitution as long as it results in the political prosperity of those with decision-making power.
The vote to block states from banning his candidacy is a rejection of a constitutional measure that was originally taken to prevent a backslide into slavery and confederate ideals. Americans should be paying close attention and wondering what, exactly, it means for our leaders to be against it.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Photo caption: The “stop the steal” protests that covered the nation in Trump’s name on Jan. 6, 2021 have broadly been labeled as an insurrection.