Did Trump engage in insurrection? US supreme court largely ignores question

In the end, the supreme court justices displayed little interest in the finer details of constitutional law, which normally pays their salaries and over which the country has been obsessing now for days.

Who is an “officer of the United States”? Leave that to one side. Should the 14th amendment’s disqualification of insurrectionists in federal posts apply only to office holders or can it also be deployed against electoral candidates? Let’s come back to that.

Even the big question – did Donald Trump engage in insurrection in luring his supporters to the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – barely got a look in at Thursday’s historic oral arguments. Only one of the nine justices, the liberal-leaning Ketanji Brown Jackson, asked a single question of Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, inviting him to state his position on such a vexed and burning issue.

No, Trump did not, Mitchell predictably replied, in part because an insurrection had to be “an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government”. Jackson shot back with the forensic wit that in her 18 months on the mahogany bench has become her trademark.

“And so a chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection,” she said. It was a rare moment of release in more than two hours of dense legal discussion.

What the justices were, almost to an individual, concerned to talk about was what the consequences of their judgment would be, both for American democracy and for their own standing. Should they side with the Colorado supreme court, and remove Trump from the ballot, then what?

Elena Kagan, another of the three liberal-leaning justices, wanted to know whether a victory for Colorado would in effect impose that state’s decision to cast Trump into the wilderness on