Published: March 4, 2024 3:49 pm
Author: RT
The judges unanimously rejected a bid to prevent the former president from contesting this year’s election in Colorado
The US Supreme Court has shot down an effort by Democrat activists to stop former President Donald Trump from contesting the upcoming presidential election in multiple states. Trump hailed the verdict as a “big win for America.”
Monday’s ruling reverses an earlier decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, which found in December that the state could keep Trump’s name off ballots under a constitutional amendment prohibiting “insurrectionists” from holding public office. Activist lawyers had successfully petitioned the state to remove Trump’s name, arguing that his alleged encouragement of the Capitol Hill riot in 2021 had made him an “insurrectionist.”
The states of Illinois and Maine had also attempted to bar Trump from contesting the election, but both will now be forced to abandon these efforts.
The ruling was unanimous, with no written dissents published. However, two different concurrences were filed.
In the majority view, conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh argued that “nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure [the] chaos” of an electoral map in which different presidential candidates were offered to voters in different states.
“The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand,” they concluded, before arguing that only Congress could enforce the insurrection clause against presidential candidates.
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