How did the Trump 14th Amendment case reach the US Supreme Court?

Discussion of a relatively obscure clause in the U.S. Constitution that would disqualify certain individuals from holding office began shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.

It began among law professors and lawyers who had been looking at Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified into the Constitution after the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of federal and state government.

The clause was reintroduced into the legal debate during the 2022 midterm elections, when government watchdog groups mounted serious challenges to elected officeholders — efforts that some lawyers have called a «test run» for applying the legal theory to former President Donald Trump.

The theory behind the ban has recently been used by secretaries of state, considered by lower level state judicial systems and even accepted by leading conservative law scholars. In December, Section 3 was finally applied to Trump in Colorado, where the top court disqualified him from running on the state's GOP presidential primary ballot.

The use of Section 3 has now hit a fever pitch, with the nation's highest court considering a blockbuster case involving Trump's ballot eligibility under the clause.

The possibility that this clause could disqualify a candidate, let alone a front-runner, has been met with widespread skepticism. Many legal scholars maintain that the U.S. Supreme Court will demur under the very high bar it sets to take someone off a ballot. But others have maintained that the legal theory can withstand scrutiny.

«A lot of people said this was a long shot case,» said Noah Bookbinder, the president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed the Colorado case with six