The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously defends democracy

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Colorado’s effort to remove former President Donald Trump from presidential ballots this year. The Colorado Supreme Court invoked Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars those who engage in insurrection against the federal government from federal office, to justify that attempt.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, “because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision could not stand.

This will have ramifications for states across the country which attempted to follow Colorado in declaring Trump ineligible for the presidency. Democrats across the country have sought to undermine democracy by trying to remove Trump from state ballots. But now their efforts have been rightly rejected by not only the conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court, but the liberal ones, too.

Among the biggest political losers of this whole sham includes Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who thought she could gain some political clout by calling for Trump’s removal from California ballots. “The constitution is clear: you must be 40 years old and not be an insurrectionist,” Kounalakis wrote in a factually incorrect letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. As a reminder to Kounalakis, the age requirement is 35.

But even Gov. Gavin Newsom was among those who stood up for democracy. “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy,” Newsom said in a statement in December. “But in California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

Indeed, this whole thing has been a distraction. Trump may indeed be as bad as his critics assert. As this editorial board described Trump on January 6, 2021: “He is a demagogue, a liar, a fraud. The Republican Party ought not to indulge his attempts to seek the presidency again and must cease to indulge his delusions any longer.”

Alas, it appears Republican voters have done just that. Many millions of Americans went through the Trump years, saw all the horrors and annoyances, and have still decided they want to see Trump stand as the Republican candidate for president this November. Democracy comes with these sort of messy outcomes.

There are broader political ramifications as well. Trump has been handed an easy political victory.  If the Democrats were truly confident in their ability to beat a candidate as flawed as Trump, they wouldn’t have resorted to this absurd effort to remove him from the ballot, which they should have known wouldn’t ever happen. We won’t hear the end, now, about how Trump beat Democratic efforts to remove him from the ballot. Brilliant.