U.S. Supreme Court decides to take up Donald Trump case, here’s what happens now
After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump was ineligible for the 2024 presidential ballot because he led an insurrection, Trump appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure enough, the U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it’s taking up the case. So what now?
There are two angles here. One is the timeline. The other is the ruling. The Supreme Court says it’ll hear arguments a month from now. This may seem like a long time, but it’s actually an extremely quick timeline for the Supreme Court. This means we’ll probably get a ruling rather quickly. It may not come in time to impact the Colorado Republican primary. But the ruling will now almost certainly come well before the November general election. The more apt question is whether the ruling will come before the Republican National Convention this summer.
Then there’s the question of the ruling itself. All along I’ve cautioned everyone not to get too excited about any positive developments in the “Trump is disqualified under the 14th Amendment saga,” simply because this was always going to end up in front of the Supreme Court. It was always going to come down to the question of how you think the likes of John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch are going to rule on this. I don’t have my hopes up. But who knows?
Keep in mind that even if the U.S. Supreme Court sides with Colorado, it doesn’t mean Trump will vanish from the ballot in every state. Instead it would more likely just open the door for states to remove Trump who want to remove him. That would mostly be blue states where he was never going to get any electoral votes to begin with. For this to impact the outcome of the 2024 election, a swing state would need to remove Trump from the ballot. And that’s if the Supreme Court rules with Colorado, which is far from a given. We’ll see.
To be clear, this Supreme Court ballot case has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s criminal cases. That’s all separate. Right now the U.S. Court of Appeals is swiftly ruling on Trump’s claim that presidential immunity prevents Jack Smith from prosecuting him. Once the court of appeals rules against Trump, we’ll see if the Supreme Court takes up Trump’s appeal in that matter.
If I were a betting man, I’d say the most likely outcome is that the Supreme Court will decline to help Trump with his criminal cases (because that’s how the Supreme Court has handled Trump’s criminal problems thus far), but the Supreme Court is more likely to rule in Trump’s favor in the 2024 ballot issue. But this Supreme Court is the trifecta of extremist, corrupt, and incoherently unpredictable, so who knows? Stay tuned. We’ll start finding out soon enough.
