Former President Trump was initially poised to spend Monday sitting in yet another courtroom, watching jury selection in his federal election case in what would have been the first day of his first criminal trial.
Instead, that trial’s date was punted, and the day handed Trump a legal victory in the form of the Supreme Court ending efforts to disqualify the former president from the ballot under a provision in the 14th Amendment.
It granted Trump a victory lap as he heads into Super Tuesday, when he is expected to move closer to clinching the Republican nomination, having handily won every state, except Washington, D.C., that’s held a presidential nominating contest so far this year.
The Supreme Court decision also gave Trump a boost legally as he stares down a separate criminal trial in New York later this month in the shadow of millions of dollars in penalties from civil judgments.
“They can go after me as a politician, they can go after me with votes, but they’re not going to go after me with that kind of lawsuit that takes somebody out of a race who’s leading,” Trump said in remarks delivered at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
A ruling against Trump in his ballot ban case Monday would’ve upended the presidential election, disqualifying him in Colorado and likely causing other states to follow suit.
But the Supreme Court unanimously avoided that outcome, with justices in both ideological camps expressing concerns about how a “patchwork” of challenges under the 14th Amendment could cause some states, but not others, to block candidates.
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration,” read the court’s unsigned opinion.
The landmark decision effectively ends the efforts to prevent Trump’s White House return under the 14th Amendment, unless Congress enacts legislation to enforce the provision.
Jason Murray, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the six voters who brought the case in Colorado, expressed disappointment in the ruling. But Murray stressed how the justices didn’t disturb the lower court’s findings that Trump engaged in insurrection, insisting that Monday’s ruling now tees up the question for voters.
“In the same way that most people wouldn’t think to vote for Barack Obama or George W. Bush for a third term because the Constitution says you can only hold two terms … I think it’s a compelling argument that people should really consider whether they want to vote for president for somebody who has been adjudicated in a trial in Colorado to be an insurrectionist and therefore to be ineligible to hold the office,” Murray said on a briefing call with reporters.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who was a party in the Supreme Court case, expressed similar sentiments, saying the decision gives oath-breaking candidates “nearly a free pass to run for office again.”
“I’m disappointed in the decision. I believe it’s Colorado’s right to bar oath-breaking insurrectionists from our ballot,” Griswold said in an interview.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling removes one more obstacle from Trump’s path back to the White House — but there’s still a long road ahead.
In D.C., Trump faces four federal counts alleging he conspired to overturn the 2020 election and galvanized his supporters to disrupt the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional Electoral College count of the results. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On top of that, he is accused in New York of falsifying business records to cover up hush money deals ahead of the 2016 election; in Georgia of attempting to subvert the state’s election results; and in Florida, on federal charges, of mishandling classified documents.
Altogether, he faces a combined 91 criminal counts across the four cases.
Trump’s efforts to delay the four cases have been mostly successful so far.
In Florida and Georgia, an onslaught of pretrial motions and unexpected scandal have slowed down the timeline for any future trials.
Trump’s federal election interference case was originally scheduled to begin Monday, but a series of appeals related to presidential immunity — something the Supreme Court is also considering — have tied the case up indefinitely.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan suspended the case last month as the former president’s claim of presidential immunity was being weighed by a federal appeals court. Days later, a three-judge panel for the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Trump on the matter — but the issue must now be weighed by the Supreme Court before the trial can continue.
“The Supreme Court must decide as quickly as humanly possible after oral argument, so that Trump can at last be judged by a jury of Americans,” said Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment and trial.
Arguments over whether Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution are scheduled for the week of April 22.
With delays in the other three cases, Trump’s first criminal trial will likely be his New York hush money case, which is set to begin with jury selection on March 25.
A conviction in any of the cases would not prevent the former president from returning to the job, though polls have indicated more than half of battleground state voters, including nearly a quarter of Republicans, would not vote for Trump if he was convicted.
“Historically, a thing like what I’ve been going through would’ve hurt a political party or a political candidate terrifically,” Trump said Monday. “You wouldn’t even run, you wouldn’t be able to run, you’d get out. This has happened over many years, many times. In this case, the polls show that I’m much more popular than I was before weaponization.”
As those cases are kicked down the road, and the 2024 election barrels nearer, it grows likelier that voters will decide on their own whether Trump should be president again — not the courts.
“From the very beginning, I was not waiting on the Supreme Court to save American democracy. That’s up to American voters,” said Griswold.