US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways

The US supreme court ruled on Monday that the former president Donald Trump cannot be kept off the ballot in Colorado, foreclosing a series of legal challenges the Republican frontrunner faced in multiple states as he seeks a return to the White House.

The 14th amendment’s third clause, enacted after the US civil war, seeks to prevent people who were elected officials who engaged in insurrection from then holding office again. It has been rarely used since, but was resurrected by advocacy groups and voters who claim it applies to Trump because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The court’s nine justices agreed that a state can’t remove a federal candidate from its ballot. Though the decision was unanimous, briefs filed separately indicate tension among the justices about how far the majority opinion went.

Because the case involved an obscure part of the constitution, the court had to parse questions of how the clause works and to whom it applies. And, perhaps most critically, the court’s decision held tremendous capacity for disruption during an election year with a leading candidate known to rile up his followers.

Here are some key takeaways from the decision and the broader context at play.

The core of the decision rests simply on the interplay between state and federal rights.

Though states administer federal elections, the court decided states have no authority to remove a candidate from the running under section 3. Instead, the majority opinion noted, the 14th amendment “expanded federal power at the expense of state autonomy”. Allowing states to do as Colorado did would “invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power”.

The language of the clause doesn’t include any direction