If you told someone roughly three years ago that Donald Trump would run for president again in 2024, you’d likely receive this response: “Are you f--king shitting me?” And then, after explaining that you were not, in fact, shitting them, face follow-up questions such as: “The same Donald Trump who just incited a deadly insurrection?” and “Is this a sick joke?” and “How is that freaking possible?”
Of course, there are multiple reasons why, three years later, a man who tried to overthrow the government can run for president again, not the least of which is the fact that Senate Republicans had the chance to ensure he would never be able to seek higher office again but chose not to take it, even though many of them publicly admitted he was a danger to society. Another one? Despite attempts by various states to keep Trump off the ballot, the Supreme Court appears poised to give him a pass.
During more than two hours of arguments on Thursday, the Court seemed to signal that it would overturn a Colorado court’s ruling that the ex-president is ineligible to hold office because he violated the 14th Amendment by engaging in insurrection. Brett Kavanaugh suggested that keeping Trump off the ballot would disenfranchise voters “to a significant degree.” John Roberts claimed that if Trump were to be removed from the ballot in Colorado, other states would kick candidates out of future elections, a prospect he said would lead to “just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election.” (Roberts did not acknowledge that those other candidates would have to engage in an insurrection themselves.) Clarence Thomas, who got the first question of the day, wanted to know if the 14th Amendment could be applied without action from Congress.
Thomas was never likely to agree to kick Trump off the ballot, which may or may not have to do with his conflict of interest: His wife, Ginni Thomas, tried extremely hard to help the ex-president overturn the 2020 election. Because of that, many Democrats have called for him to recuse himself from the case, including Senator Dick Durbin, who said Thursday, “It’s a shame he’s allowing any question of bias to exist, given his family’s reported involvement in January 6th.” Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. commented on Thomas’s participation in the case, “It’s no wonder public trust in the court is terrible,” and said Thomas should resign. Representative Jasmine Crockett suggested that Thomas would not be “able to accept the facts as determined by the lower courts that Trump did engage in an insurrection.”
Unfortunately, it does not appear that Thomas, or the Court’s conservative wing, are the only ones poised to overturn the Colorado ruling. Per CNN:
Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, told The Washington Post he expects a “lopsided ruling reversing Colorado,” with eight and possibly all nine justices ruling to overturn the Colorado decision. But he added that Trump might not get so lucky in another important case that the Court will soon decide:
While the two cases are “legally unconnected,” Hasen noted that they might be related in the justices’ minds because they “could make a grand compromise where Trump is put back on the ballot, but he goes to trial on election subversion.”
