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^ will it domino effect hit all 50 states before reaching the Supreme Court of the United States and a ruling before April?

If Not? the man shot and missed!!

Pathetic.

It will find a work around to handle this promptly along with Trump's other pending cases and issues, IMO. But, they are going to have to work real hard to get there. There are some easy jurisdictional issues any one of which seized on and overturned could justify dismissal and that could lead to a brief dismissal Opinion. Will Clarence recuse based on his wife's post-election activities and the new info that came out over the last few days? Shamefully, probably not. I Think it will go 9-0, or real close to that for Trump without prejudice meaning the multiple issues can be re-litigated upon new facts or law.be
For whatever it is worth, I read the Opinion and Dissents and beliive the CST did it's work to make this easier for a prompt SCOTUS ruling.

Just like Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

This man stands on principles

Vivek Ramaswamy Withdraws from Colorado Primary Until Trump is Reinstated – Challenges DeSantis, Haley, and Christie to Do the Same (VIDEO)

by Jim Hoft Dec. 20, 2023 7:15 am

I heard Pelosi could have stopped the protest...

True dat. It's clear in the Opinion. I read like maybe 200 pages, including the Dissents, which were not nearly as well written.
Even at the oral argument before CSC, his lawyers refused to even define "insurection."

Colorado Trump Ban Puts Supreme Court in Hot Seat
Justices will likely have to rule on whether 14th Amendment’s banning insurrectionists from office applies to former

WSJ
The Colorado ruling disqualifying former President Donald Trump from the ballot puts a novel and highly sensitive set of constitutional questions before the Supreme Court, likely forcing the justices to intervene directly in a presidential election in a way not seen since Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Tuesday’s 4-3 decision by Colorado’s highest court found that Trump was disqualified from being president again because he engaged in insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to stop the certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.

The ruling threw an unexpected jolt of uncertainty into the 2024 presidential contest and placed the Supreme Court in a position it likely would have preferred to avoid: having to resolve unprecedented legal issues that also ignite strong political passions among the nation’s electorate. Minutes after the Colorado court released its decision, Trump’s campaign pledged a swift appeal to the high court.

“This case screams out for Supreme Court resolution,” said Jessica Levinson, an election-law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “The court can’t let state supreme courts make a patchwork of decisions. The case brings up an important federal constitutional question with time sensitive consequences. They will need to act, and act quickly.”

Disqualification provision is little explored
At issue is Section 3 of the Civil War-era 14th Amendment, which says that acts of insurrection or rebellion can disqualify someone from holding office. Lawmakers drafted the section during Reconstruction to prevent Confederates who rose up in arms against the Union from regaining power through the ballot box.

Until the Jan. 6 riot, Section 3 was regarded as a relic of darker times in the nation’s history, largely forgotten and seldom litigated. Over the last two years, the disqualification clause received a new look in legal circles, including from an ideologically mixed group of academics who asserted that Section 3 can and should be enforced against Trump. Their conclusions helped fuel a series of disqualification suits across the U.S., many of which are pending.

Trump had won a series of early decisions rejecting such challenges, and the issue appeared to be fading in importance heading into 2024. That all changed with Tuesday’s Colorado decision. While several other courts had sought to sidestep difficult questions about Trump’s behavior in early 2021 and his eligibility in 2024, the Colorado Supreme Court addressed them head on, producing some deep internal disagreements that previewed the legal jousting to come.

The court’s majority said the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause applied to the presidency, reversing the holding of a state district judge who said it didn’t.

The majority also found that it had ample authority under Colorado’s elections code to decide questions of Trump’s eligibility in an expedited fashion. Dissenting justices said they didn’t believe state lawmakers had given courts such broad powers.

One point of deep disagreement was whether removing Trump from the ballot violated his due process rights, given that he hasn’t been convicted of a crime and the pending criminal charges against him aren’t for insurrection.

The majority found that Trump received adequate due process during a weeklong trial-court hearing on whether he could hold office again, adding that election eligibility cases have to be decided quickly. One dissenting justice was particularly vehement in opposition, saying it violated bedrock American principles to remove Trump from the ballot in this fashion. That justice also said Section 3 wasn’t directly enforceable without legislation from Congress.

“Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past—dare I say, engaged in insurrection—there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office,” Justice Carlos Samour Jr. wrote.

That sentiment could have broad appeal with the Supreme Court, said David Orentlicher, a member of the Nevada legislature and a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“I could see the Supreme Court worrying about that and saying if you’re going to disqualify someone you need to give them more of an opportunity to make their case because that’s such a momentous deprivation of liberty and rights,” said Orentlicher, an elected Democrat who has argued that efforts to disqualify Trump could set a troubling precedent.

Legal issues, political considerations
Aside from the core legal questions, the Supreme Court will be well aware of the seismic consequences of any nationwide ruling that effectively disqualifies Trump from being re-elected. A large number of Trump supporters continue to believe his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. A high court ruling keeping him off the ballot would further inflame those tensions.

The case “exerts major pressure on the Court,” said Derek T. Muller, an election-law professor at Notre Dame Law School, and taking it will require the justices “to step into the thorniest of political thickets.”

The Supreme Court most prominently faced such a direct electoral case in Bush v. Gore in 2000, when it reversed a recount ordered by Florida’s highest court and effectively handed the White House to George W. Bush. That 5-4 decision, along partisan lines, contributed to public perception of the court as a political institution.

“Since Bush v. Gore the court has been more cautious with overt political cases,” Muller said.

To date, the Supreme Court has provided Trump little comfort in his efforts to stymie criminal and congressional investigations. In 2020, a 7-2 court rejected Trump’s arguments to block a New York state grand jury probe, and in 2022 it declined to hear Trump’s appeal of an appeals court decision allowing a House panel to review White House records related to the Jan. 6 attack.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he would have heard Trump’s appeal in that case.

Most observers of the Supreme Court said they believed the justices would reverse the Colorado ruling.

“The justices don’t want it to look like they’re taking this fundamental question away from the electorate,” Levinson said. “The only real question is which issue will the Supreme Court reverse on.”

Political reaction pours in
Trump’s 2024 GOP presidential opponents all criticized Tuesday’s Colorado ruling, while some of the former president’s other Republican critics also worried about the political effects it could have.

“I think we have to beat Trump at the ballot box, not in court,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, posted Wednesday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Bill Kristol, another Republican Trump critic, said the prospect of the Supreme Court not upholding the Colorado ruling could end up helping Trump.

“He gets to be a victim and then he gets to be a victor; he wins in April or May or something and then he looks like he’s even stronger,” Kristol said on a podcast posted Tuesday night.

President Biden, after arriving in Milwaukee on Wednesday, declined to comment on the Colorado ruling. Asked if Trump was an insurrectionist, Biden said: “Well I think it’s certainly self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. No question about it.”

If Trump Is Disqualified, He Can Still Run
Colorado’s Supreme Court overlooks the 20th Amendment.


WSJ: Opinion
The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that Donald Trump’s name not appear on next year’s Republican presidential primary ballot. The court found that Mr. Trump “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, and that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars a person who has done so from serving as president. Even if these findings are both correct, the Constitution doesn’t bar Mr. Trump from the ballot.

Presidents are selected through an indirect, drawn-out process. In November 2024, voters will choose presidential electors. When voting, citizens will see the names of presidential candidates when, in fact, they are voting for the electors who will later vote for president.

One problem for the Colorado court’s ruling is that the 14th Amendment never declares that voters can’t select presidential electors who are pledged to vote for nonqualified candidates. The 14th Amendment disqualifies certain people from holding federal and state office and doesn’t explicitly regulate ballot access. Nor does it expressly authorize state officials to judge the qualifications of candidates or electors.

The more decisive flaw is that the ruling ignores a key provision of the 20th Amendment, which provides: “If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified” (emphasis added).

The italicized text implies that electors can lawfully vote for a candidate even if he isn’t qualified to serve as president—and he can take office if he qualifies later. But how could that happen? A simple example is if the president-elect will turn 35 after Inauguration Day. (Similarly, Joe Biden was 29 when he was elected to the Senate in 1972 but turned 30 before the start of his term.)

Under the 14th Amendment, a disqualification based on insurrection can also go away: “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” It often did so in the postbellum period. In July 1868, three weeks after the 14th Amendment’s ratification, South Carolina’s Legislature elected Franklin J. Moses Sr. as the state’s chief justice. He took office after Congress removed his disqualification in December.

If the U.S. Supreme Court holds that Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection, it’s hard to imagine Congress voting by two-thirds to remove his disqualification. If he is the Republican nominee, his choice of vice president may be even more important than Mr. Biden’s.


Messrs. Harrison and Prakash are law professors at the University of Virginia

Dems...this is your day.

Go out and get blind drunk...celebrate and whoop it up. Get that victory!

Doesn't help the Dems secure any on the fence votes...

Yeah, that States Rights thing might work!

Sincerely, 1861.

Textualist devil'sadvocate: Where does the Constitution even say the word "primary"?

Again I will stand by my original post here... 50 states domino effect and still get a ruling in the United States Supreme Courts before is it April 2024 to make the Ballots?

The Colorado Court That Barred Trump: Appointed by Democrats but Narrowly Split

The 4-3 decision was harshly criticized by Trump supporters, who called it undemocratic. But some observers say the court is notably nonpartisan.


NYT
The Colorado Supreme Court, which barred former President Donald J. Trump from the state’s primary ballot, is composed of seven justices who were all appointed by Democratic governors.

Justices on the court serve 10-year terms, and Democrats have held the governor’s office for the last 16 years, so all of the current justices were appointed by that party, with five appointed by one man: John Hickenlooper, who was governor from 2011 to 2019 and is now one of the state’s U.S. senators.

Still, the chief justice, Brian Boatright, is a Republican, while three justices are Democrats and three are listed in voter registration records as “unaffiliated” with a party.

And the court was not of one mind on whether Mr. Trump should appear on the ballot. The decision was 4-3, with the court ruling that the 14th Amendment forbade Mr. Trump from holding office because he had “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters overran the Capitol. (Of the four who voted with the majority, two are registered Democrats and two are not registered with a party.)

The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic. The head of Colorado’s Republican Party, Dave Williams, said “out-of-control radicals” in Colorado “would rather spit on our Constitution than let the people decide which candidates should represent them in a free and fair election.”

But some observers of the court say that it is notably nonpartisan, in part because of how the justices are named. The governor must choose from a pool of nominees recommended by a bipartisan commission. The majority of the members on that commission are not lawyers. Still, most are chosen by the governor.

The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

“It’s perceived to be way less political than the U.S. Supreme Court, and I think it’s true that it’s way less political,” said Chris Jackson, a lawyer in Denver whose practice includes election law. “There aren’t really conservative and liberal justices in the way that we describe the U.S. Supreme Court justices.”

The decision on Trump on Tuesday was not the first time the court has removed a political candidate from the ballot. In 2020, it ruled that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Michelle Ferrigno Warren, could not appear on the primary ballot because she had not collected enough signatures from voters. A lower court had been more lenient, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, but the state’s highest court disagreed.

Two years earlier, in 2018, the court removed a Republican candidate from a ballot. It found that Representative Doug Lamborn, a longtime congressman from Colorado Springs, had not collected enough valid voter signatures to be on the ballot. In that case, however, a federal court disagreed and eventually reinstated Mr. Lamborn, who won the election.

Mr. Lamborn said in a statement that he hoped Mr. Trump would have similar success in the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This wrongful decision was made by the same court that unconstitutionally removed my name from the ballot years ago & had to be corrected by a federal court,” Mr. Lamborn wrote on the social media platform X.

Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court can choose whether to hear cases that are appealed to it, and, in some of the state’s biggest recent cases, the Colorado high court has declined.

That was true in two cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighed in: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which that court sided in 2018 with a baker who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and a case this year, Counterman v. Colorado, in which the high court said that the First Amendment put limits on laws banning online threats.

Doug Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said the state’s high court appeared, in its Trump decision, to try to walk a tight line. It had ruled to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot but put a pause on its own ruling.

If the case is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, as is expected, then Mr. Trump’s name would, under the state court’s order, remain on the ballot until the Supreme Court decides the case. But the Colorado secretary of state said on Tuesday that she would follow whatever court order is in place on Jan. 5, when the state must certify ballots for the primary election.

In staying its own decision until the Supreme Court weighs in, Professor Spencer said, the state court had “teed it up in just the right way” to be decided by the nation's top court.

He added: “They’re very thorough in terms of explaining themselves, whether or not you agree with them.”

The Folly of Colorado’s Trump Disqualification

Four state Supreme Court judges ban the former President from the 2024 ballot without due process.


WSJ Editorial Board
Anti-Trump lawyers have been peddling that Mr. Trump can be disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Colorado’s 4-3 Supreme Court majority is the first court to buy the argument, and in the process it has blundered into the middle of the 2024 election. The four Democratic justices join special counsel Jack Smith and New York and Georgia prosecutors in providing ironic assistance to Mr. Trump in gaining the GOP presidential nomination, and maybe the White House.

The court says Mr. Trump is disqualified under the post-Civil War 14th Amendment because he inspired and “engaged” in an “insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. that took place on Jan. 6, 2021. They rely largely on evidence compiled by the House Jan. 6 special committee.

Mr. Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election through Jan. 6 was disgraceful, and it is one of several reasons not to trust him with so much power again. It was an attempt to obstruct the counting of electoral votes. But the evidence is unpersuasive that this amounted to an insurrection or rebellion under the statutory or constitutional meaning of those terms.

The justices claim the 14th Amendment is “self-executing,” which means that ballot disqualification doesn’t require a conviction in court. Yet the Senate acquitted Mr. Trump of the impeachment charge of insurrection. And Mr. Smith, the special counsel, didn’t include insurrection under 18 U.S.C. Section 2383 of the U.S. criminal code in his four-count indictment of Mr. Trump. Does anyone think the hard-bitten Mr. Smith would shy from doing so if he thought he could prove it before a jury?

The court’s chief justice, Brian Boatright, cited the lack of a conviction for insurrection in his dissent from the Colorado majority. And in a separate dissent, Justice Carlos Samour wrote that Mr. Trump was denied the “procedural due process” required before disqualification is justified. The 14th Amendment was written to guarantee due process to all Americans, not to deny it.

The Colorado Four also do a legal dance around the fact that Section 3’s disqualification clause doesn’t expressly include the President. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey explained in these pages on Sept. 8, the clause applies only to those who have taken an oath “as an officer of the United States,” so Mr. Trump can’t be barred from the ballot. The Colorado majority’s contrary reading of the clause will get careful scrutiny at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Justices could decline to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal, but given the legal and democratic stakes they almost have to take it. This is the first time any state has used Section 3 to disqualify a presidential candidate, but if it stands in Colorado it won’t be the last. A broad definition of insurrection would open the door for other potential candidates to be disqualified depending on their participation in controversial political protests.

Dragging the Supreme Court into the presidential race is itself damaging to democracy. Mr. Smith has already asked the Justices to weigh in on Mr. Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution. Whatever the Court decides, and especially if the Justices are divided on either question, half of the country will be angry. The political left is leading a campaign to delegitimize the Court, and these fraught cases will offer more ammunition to partisans, whatever the legal merits.

The Colorado disqualification shows how Democrats are determined to make 2024 an election decided by lawyers and courts, not by voters. They seem to believe this is the way finally to banish Donald Trump from politics, but have they been paying attention?

Their second impeachment didn’t finish him, and four indictments with 91 felony counts have caused GOP voters to rally to his side. This ballot-denial gambit is likely to have a similar effect, and it will now dominate political news up to the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses. The Colorado Four may think they’re heroes of the resistance, but they’ve given Mr. Trump a great in-kind campaign contribution.

Democrats believe that Mr. Trump is such a threat to America’s democratic institutions that they’re justified in abusing those institutions themselves. They’re damaging democracy in the name of trying to save it.