Former President Donald Trump speaks during a commit to caucus rally on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023, in Waterloo, Iowa. The event began shortly after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
The Colorado Supreme Court ignited a political firestorm with its ruling that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to hold office again, disqualifying him from appearing on the state’s primary ballot.
Just how far those embers reach — and how hot they burn — in coming weeks could shape the country’s political discourse and electoral system.
The U.S. Supreme Court will almost certainly weigh in on Tuesday’s ruling, which found Trump committed insurrection with his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, and is thus barred from office under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The decision has the Colorado Republican Party threatening to change how it weighs in on the party’s presidential nominee.
And the unprecedented ruling — after several other states’ courts have dismissed similar ballot challenges of Trump — was immediately dissected or torn apart by political candidates, Trump supporters and opponents, legal analysts, Coloradans and voters across America. All were looking for potential implications beyond Colorado, a blue-trending state Trump would be unlikely to win in November 2024.
The fallout is still uncertain, with the U.S. Supreme Court facing a range of options — some of which would mean wading into thorny political issues and taking sides on divisive questions. But not all would necessarily require a pronouncement on Trump’s eligibility, legal analysts said.
“It’s obviously unprecedented on a national level and has huge ramifications for the upcoming election,” said Jason Dunn, the former U.S. Attorney for Colorado during the Trump administration and an expert in election law. “It’s the biggest case to come out of the Colorado Supreme Court in decades.”
In the state court’s unsigned 4-3 opinion, the majority acknowledged their decision put the court in “uncharted territory.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, giving the Colorado justices no guiding light. And a major party’s candidate had never been banned from the ballot here, much less a candidate who once held the nation’s highest office.
Acknowledging the uncertainty, the court’s majority opinion included a stay of the ruling. It will allow Trump to remain on Colorado’s March 5 primary ballot if any appeal to the nation’s highest court is in process by Jan. 4, the day before ballots must be certified.
Trump’s team immediately vowed to appeal.
Low-key court steps into political fray
The Colorado Supreme Court’s seven members all were appointed by Democratic governors. Despite that, it has a reputation for being much less political than the U.S. Supreme Court — with its current 6-3 conservative majority — or even many federal appeals courts, said Christopher Jackson, an appellate lawyer at Colorado’s Holland and Hart law firm.
And not all are necessarily Democrats: Chief Justice Brian Boatright, affiliated as a Republican voter, received his first state court appointment from a Republican governor before a Democrat elevated him to the Supreme Court.
“You get very different agreements and disagreements on issues — there are no blocs,” Jackson said.
He saw the 4-3 split on Trump’s case as unusual for the court, which usually rules unanimously or with just one or two dissenters. He chalked that up to the number and difficulty of the questions the justices were asked to decipher.
The 14th Amendment’s Section 3, a post-Civil War provision aimed at keeping Confederates from running for election, bars people from holding office if they took an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion. The Colorado court’s majority found that Trump’s actions and words fanned the flames on Jan. 6, as Congress was counting electoral votes from the 2020 election he lost, and his speech “was not protected by the First Amendment.”
But a Denver judge ruled earlier that even if Trump engaged in insurrection, it wasn’t clear enough that Section 3 applied to the presidency.
“I’ve spent a good amount of time looking at the case and it’s very, very difficult from a legal perspective,” Jackson said. “There are so many different ways to come out on all of those questions.”
Politically heated reactions to the ruling — including brief posts by Trump on his Truth Social account — raised the potential for threats against the justices. Steven Vasconcellos, Colorado’s state court administrator, acknowledged the need for precautions in emails to the justices Tuesday night and to court staff Wednesday morning, according to records provided to The Denver Post. A state courts spokesman declined to discuss security matters or any threats received.
Political reaction runs gamut — though largely along party lines
As Trump’s campaign leveraged the ruling to seek donations from outraged supporters, Trump posted Wednesday morning: “WHAT A SHAME FOR OUR COUNTRY!!!”
Meanwhile, on a Milwaukee airport tarmac, President Biden said it was “self-evident” that Trump was an insurrectionist, adding: “You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision.”
Among Colorado politicos, responses largely have fallen along party lines, though the plaintiffs who brought the Trump ballot challenge included several current or former Republicans.
U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican who has criticized Trump’s refusal to accept that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, that the court made the “wrong decision.” In her own social media post, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert called the ruling “extreme judicial activism.”
The Colorado legislature’s top Republicans — House Minority Leader Mike Lynch and Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen — both issued statements Tuesday night criticizing the ruling.
Among Democrats, U.S. Rep. Jason Crow posted on X Tuesday that “The Colorado Supreme Court has it right.” For Sara Loflin, executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, “the Supreme Court sent the message that the Constitution matters.”
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a frequent Trump critic and the person tasked with enforcing this week’s ruling, said she agreed with the court’s decision, calling it a “big ruling for an unprecedented situation.”
“Honestly, I wasn’t sure how they would rule,” she said. “But I think they got it right. We’re in this unprecedented situation because of Donald Trump. He has created this scenario for himself.”
But that hasn’t stopped Dave Williams, chair of the state GOP, from threatening to remove the party from the primary process altogether if people can’t vote for Trump — the far-and-away frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Instead, Williams said, the party might try to switch to a caucus system to allow voters here to voice their support.
The lack of due process and deprivation of voters’ rights that he sees at issue in the ruling “are fundamental things that are now in the crosshairs because radical Democrats in Colorado and on the bench have decided to take the radical step of undermining democracy,” said Williams, who has echoed Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election results.
Dick Wadhams, a Republican consultant, Trump critic and former Colorado party chair, said he thought it was inappropriate for a court to “throw someone from the ballot,” and the ruling was “overkill.”
But he agreed with Griswold that state parties can’t, under Colorado law, just change from the presidential primary system in the way Williams suggests. Wadhams called the idea “absurd,” and Griswold said an attempt likely would result in further litigation.
If Trump seeks an appeal in the next two weeks, as expected, that may all be a moot point — with Trump staying on the primary ballot, under the state court’s stay, unless the U.S. Supreme Court says otherwise.
“I do think it will help Donald Trump politically”
The ruling was just the latest setback for a candidate who has survived — and even seen his support solidify — through a slew of scandals that included hush money payments to a porn star. He also faces facing dozens of pending charges through indictments at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately, I do think it will help Donald Trump politically in the short run,” Wadhams said of the ballot ruling, adding the he thinks Trump should be held accountable for alleged misconduct. “He seems to benefit whenever there’s another indictment or, in this (instance), a case to throw him off the ballot.”
But that more likely means inflaming and shoring up Trump’s base than expanding his support, Wadhams said.
Trump’s Republican rivals — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and former governors Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — all criticized the Colorado court’s ruling, not Trump.
Peter Loge, associate director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University and a veteran of the Obama Administration, expressed doubt the Colorado ruling would affect Trump’s standing, unless he’s completely disqualified from running.
“No one is going to look at this and say: ‘Here’s a new thing to consider. I’m going to change my mind,’ ” Loge said.
Still, he said, “This is a big deal. For any court to say a president of the United States incited an insurrection — tried to overthrow the government — is a huge deal.”
The legal saga now awaits Trump’s promised appeal.
While the U.S. Supreme Court’s likely review is unresolved, attorney Jessica Smith predicted a burst of activity in states with similar election laws, as Trump opponents try to leverage Colorado’s ruling. She leads the Religious Institutions and First Amendment practice group at Holland and Hart.
“No one wants to be the first to say something new,” Smith said. “And that’s precisely what the Colorado Supreme Court did here.”
A tough road ahead for plaintiffs?
But she predicted a tough road ahead for the plaintiffs seeking to keep Trump off the ballot.
Smith listed off the questions that could be raised before the high court, including: Was the Colorado court correct in finding the presidency falls under the offices covered by the insurrection clause? Did Trump engage in insurrection? Was he afforded appropriate due process in Colorado’s courts? Did the First Amendment protect Trump’s speech ahead of the Capitol riot — a key piece of the insurrection claim?
And is that question even appropriate for the courts to consider, or is it too political for judges’ jurisdiction?
“Donald Trump only has to win one issue of any individual issues,” Smith said, but the plaintiffs “have to win on everything.”
Colorado’s majority quoted a ruling from Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s conservative Supreme Court appointees, from when he was a federal judge in Colorado. He ruled then that the state properly kept a naturalized citizen born in Guyana off the presidential ballot because he didn’t meet the constitutional qualifications — an instance of a court determining eligibility.
But the stakes are bigger in Trump’s case.
Chris Mattei, a former federal corruption prosecutor based in Connecticut, says the former president’s attorneys will have to decide which questions they want to ask the high court to consider.
He predicted the court was unlikely to take on the lower courts’ finding that Trump engaged in an insurrection, since the U.S. Supreme Court generally doesn’t weigh in on findings of fact. Instead, the justices are likely to consider more purely legal questions.
Dunn, the former U.S. attorney in Denver, said the court could try to pass the buck to Congress by saying lawmakers need to create a legal framework to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Or it could block Trump solely from Colorado’s primary ballot, which wouldn’t likely affect his election chances — though that would open the door for other states to keep him off their ballots, too.
The bigger underlying issue, Dunn said, is the potential impact of the case on the public’s trust in the judicial system and the U.S. Supreme Court — with the justices potentially put in the difficult position of determining the outcome of an election.
Staff writer Shelly Bradbury and the Associated Press contributed to this story.
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