In a big win for former President Donald Trump and the Republicans, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), unanimously ruled that Colorado did not have the right to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, as Section Three of Amendment 14 was meant to be enforced by Congress, not the states. Some Congressional Democrats then unveiled plans to take Trump off the ballot, leading Johnson to tell them to “get a grip.”
As background, in its ruling, SCOTUS ruled, “The Constitution empowers Congress to prescribe how those determinations should be made. The relevant provision is Section 5, which enables Congress, subject of course to judicial review, to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the Fourteenth Amendment . . . Or as Senator Howard put it at the time the Amendment was framed, Section 5 ‘casts upon Congress the responsibility of seeing to it, for the future, that all the sections of the amendment are carried out in good faith.'”
Continuing, it added, “This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”
Predictably, many on the left had a meltdown over the court not keeping Trump off the ballot, with some, such as former MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann, going nuclear over the news and even calling for SCOTUS to be dissolved.
Others on the left, such as Rep. Jamie Raskin, have decided that the ruling means they should use Congress’ legislative power in an attempt to keep Trump off the ballot. Axios, quoting Rep. Raskin in the wake of the decision, said, “Congress will have to act” and that he would revive the legislation he had already introduced to keep Trump off the ballot “in light of the Supreme Court’s decision.”
Raskin also went on CNN and said, “I’m working with a number of my colleagues—including [Democratic Representatives] Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell—to revive legislation…to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by section three of the 14th amendment,”
Watch Raskin here:
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson fired back at Rep. Raskin through a spokesperson, saying, “Democrats need to get a grip. In this country, the American people decide the next president—not the courts and not the Congress.” As Speaker Johnson and his party control the House, it is very unlikely that Rep. Raskin his his leftist colleagues will be able to ram through a bill keeping Trump from running in the election, particularly with Johnson’s “get a grip” attitude toward the situation.
In a post on X about the court’s ruling, Speaker Johnson said, “Today, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed what we all knew: the Colorado Supreme Court engaged in a purely partisan attack against the frontrunner for the Republican presidential primary. States engaging in the same activist, undemocratic behaviors should take notice and leave it to the American people to decide who will be president.”
Featured image credit: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Mike Johnson, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=139920652
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