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The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Colorado Supreme Court decision a day before Super Tuesday, allowing Donald Trump to appear on the state’s ballot. The nine justices unanimously held that states cannot enforce the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates from federal races and that the enforcement of the insurrection clause falls within the jurisdiction of the United States Congress alone. Trump handily won Colorado’s Republican primary with 63.3% of the vote.
Straight Arrow News contributor Dr. Rashad Richey explains how the country’s highest court got it wrong. Dr. Richey argues that Donald Trump, facing criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, should have been disqualified from Colorado’s presidential primary.
The Supreme Court has basically said that an insurrectionist can, in fact, become president of the United States, because their ruling decides to reverse the ruling of the Colorado court that did, in fact, remove Trump from the ballot. But in doing so, the court did not reverse the findings of the Colorado court that Donald Trump is, in fact, an insurrectionist.
The Constitution clearly says that an insurrectionist, those that engage in such conduct, they can be barred from holding positions of government trust. As a matter of fact, we’ve done it before. We barred people from running for president. We have barred people from running for Congress under the same Constitutional clause. All of a sudden, it’s not good enough.
Now, this is going to be an interesting realization as we move forward. Because if you take the court’s ruling, the Supreme Court’s ruling on face value, it suggests that somehow states are not able to enforce a Constitutional right or constitutional dynamics — they cannot uphold them. But that doesn’t make sense, because states routinely engage in the enforcement of dynamics associated with the federal government, i.e. Constitution and federal law.
