(NewsReady.com) – The Supreme Court doesn’t often reach a unanimous agreement on an issue. That’s exactly what happened when an issue involving former president Donald Trump came before the justices. And their decision was a major political win for him.
On March 4, the court ruled 9-0 that Trump can remain on Colorado’s primary ballot. The ruling reversed a decision by the state’s Supreme Court that he was ineligible to run under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment because he committed insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The SCOTUS didn’t buy that reasoning. The justices wrote that Congress, not individual states, was responsible for enforcing the Insurrection Clause of the Constitution. The justices wrote, “states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 […] especially the Presidency.” They also expressed concern that allowing Colorado to kick Trump off of the ballot could result in chaos, with other states doing something similar “perhaps beyond the inauguration.”
Although the three liberal justices on the court agreed that Colorado didn’t have the power to prevent Trump from running in the primary, they thought the majority opinion went too far and wrote a concurring opinion. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson stated the judgment could “insulate” the 45th president from “future controversy.” They said they couldn’t “join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily,” so they only agreed with the judgment.
The decision wasn’t surprising. During oral arguments, all of the justices expressed skepticism over Colorado’s decision to kick the former president off the ballot. They were especially concerned, as they were in the majority opinion, that it would rip the country’s democratic elections apart by allowing partisan politicians to remove presidential candidates from the ballot.
Trump responded to the news by saying it was a “very important decision” that was “well-crafted.” He said people would be talking about the ruling in 100 or 200 years from now, Axios reported.
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