Trump v. Anderson

Trump v. Anderson, a legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4, 2024, unanimously overturned a December 2023 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court holding that Donald Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination of 2024, was ineligible to appear on the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot because of his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson ensured that Trump’s name would remain on Republican primary ballots in Colorado and other states.

According to the Colorado Supreme Court, Trump’s incitement of a mob of supporters who then attacked the Capitol in an effort to prevent the formal certification of Joe Biden’s victory by a joint session of Congress constituted an insurrection against the government of the United States and thus disqualified Trump from holding the office of president of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment, adopted in the wake of the American Civil War (1861–65), states in its Section 3 that:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Section 3 was originally used to prevent the return to office of former federal and state officials who had sworn to uphold the Constitution but then betrayed the country by supporting the Confederacy.

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Major Supreme Court Cases from the 2023–24 Term: Trump v. Anderson

The Colorado Supreme Court temporarily stayed its own decision, specifying that Trump’s name should remain on the ballot if a review of the case by the U.S. Supreme Court were sought before January 4, 2024. Lawyers representing Trump did just that, filing a writ of certiorari (a petition for review) with the Supreme Court on January 3. The Court quickly agreed to hear the case—which it based on the question “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?”—and set an expedited schedule for briefings and oral argument, presumably in view of the profound implications of the question presented and the short time remaining before primary elections would be held in Colorado and several other states.

Background

The case under review originated as a suit filed in a Colorado district court in Denver, Anderson v. Griswold, by a group of Republican and independent voters in Colorado in September 2023. The voters sought an order prohibiting the Colorado secretary of state from adding Trump’s name to the Republican primary ballot, arguing that state election law required that Trump be excluded as a constitutionally disqualified officeholder under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, given his role in the events of January 6. Having conducted a detailed examination of the day’s events, as well as the broader context of Trump’s long-standing promotion of the falsehood that Democrats had stolen the U.S. presidential election of 2020, the court concluded that an “insurrection,” as the term is used in Section 3, had indeed taken place and that Trump had “engaged” in that insurrection.

The district court also rejected a broad range of challenges to the voters’ suit that had been submitted by Trump and the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRSCC), both of whom had been granted permission to intervene (i.e., to participate as affected third parties) in the case. The court determined, for example, that Colorado state election law did permit voters to question Trump’s status as a qualified presidential candidate; that the disqualification provision of Section 3 did not require special congressional legislation in order to be enforced; that determining whether an individual is disqualified as an officeholder under Section 3 is not a clear-cut “political question” that must be decided by Congress rather than the courts; that the speech by which Trump incited his audience to attack the Capitol was not protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech; and that the CRSCC’s First Amendment freedom of association, which it exercised in selecting Trump as its presidential nominee, would not be violated if the state were to exclude Trump from the primary ballot on constitutional grounds.

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Nevertheless, the district court ultimately ruled against the voters on the basis of its finding that Trump was not constitutionally disqualified, because the relevant language of Section 3, in the court’s estimation, does not apply to the office of president of the United States but only to other (lower-level) civil and military offices. According to the court, the U.S. presidency is not an “office…under the United States,” the president is not “an officer of the United States,” and the oath taken by the president is not an oath to “support the Constitution of the United States” but rather (in the language of the oath itself) to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

The voters then appealed the district court’s decision to the Colorado Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on December 6. In a ruling issued two weeks later, the court affirmed most of the district court’s findings, including that Trump had engaged in an insurrection, but it also reversed the district court’s interpretation of Section 3 as excluding the office of president of the United States, concluding that “President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three” and that “it would be a wrongful act” for him to be listed as a candidate on the state’s Republican primary ballot.

Trump’s writ of certiorari and an early brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court by the CRSCC advanced many of the same arguments that had been rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court while warning in dramatic terms of the dire consequences of the latter court’s ruling. (Trump’s petition declared, for example, that the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision “would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” while the CRSCC’s brief asserted that the ruling “threatens to decide the outcome of the 2024 election by stripping the American people of the right to elect the President and transferring that right to state courts.”) During the remainder of January 2024, dozens of other briefs supporting one or the other (or neither) side of the case were submitted to the Court.

Per curiam and concurring opinions

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in a per curiam (unsigned) opinion issued on March 4, 2024, one day before Colorado and several other states were scheduled to hold primary elections on Super Tuesday. The Court held that the Colorado Supreme Court had erred in its order to remove Trump from the state’s primary ballot because individual states lack authority under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 against candidates for (or current holders of) federal, as opposed to state, offices. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 5, which declares that “Congress shall have power to enforce” the amendment’s provisions “by appropriate legislation,” the Court argued that “the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, on its face, does not affirmatively delegate” such enforcement power to the states. Instead, “the terms of the Amendment speak only to enforcement by Congress, which enjoys power to enforce the Amendment through legislation pursuant to Section 5.” The single historical example of such legislation is the federal Enforcement Act of 1870, which, as the Court explained, “authorized federal district attorneys to bring civil actions…to remove anyone holding nonlegislative office…in violation of Section 3, and made holding or attempting to hold office in violation of Section 3 a federal crime.”

In support of its finding that Section 3 can be enforced only by Congress, the Court observed that state enforcement of Section 3 would inevitably result in a nationwide “patchwork” in which “a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct.” Elections for federal offices, especially the U.S. presidency, would thus be dramatically disrupted.

Notably, the Court’s ruling did not address the questions of whether the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack constituted an insurrection and whether Trump had engaged in an insurrection through his role in the day’s events.

In a brief concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the Court’s majority that the Colorado Supreme Court lacked the constitutional authority to remove Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot but questioned the necessity of its finding that Section 3 can be enforced only through congressional legislation. “I agree that States lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates,” she declared, but “that principle is sufficient to resolve this case, and I would decide no more than that.” A second concurring opinion, written by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, also agreed that presidential candidates cannot be rendered ineligible by state courts but forcefully criticized the Court’s majority for needlessly limiting Section 3’s enforcement mechanism while deciding other “novel constitutional questions” not directly relevant to the issue at hand. “We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily,” the justices avowed, “and we therefore concur only in the judgment.”