After months of activists and experts calling for the Supreme Court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused.
« Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos. » Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election.
The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.
During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons, » when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? » More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? »
As More described England, the United States also is « planted thick with laws, from coast to coast. » The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.
After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.”
Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory « unassailable » and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.
Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.
