The U.S. Supreme Court put to bed the opinions of any and all “legal experts” on Monday when it unanimously ruled that states do not possess the constitutional authority to kick former President Donald Trump off of the presidential ballot.
The Colorado Supreme Court first ruled in December 2023 that Democrats could remove Trump from the Centennial State’s 2024 primary ballot. The 2024 frontrunner appealed, and the case quickly made its way to the highest court in the land. Corporate media talking heads spent the next few months arguing the nine SCOTUS justices have the constitutional authority to override voters’ wills and affirm the Colorado decision.
David French, the “principled conservative” who makes a living from trashing conservative voters and principles, insisted in a New York Times opinion article in January that “The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong.”
“Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice,” French wrote.
French’s declaration was quickly mimicked by various corporate media publications and networks. These included The Atlantic, which claimed the Colorado decision was “true originalism”; The New Republic, which claimed “The Colorado Supreme Court Got It Right”; The Intelligencer, which claimed “The Legal Merits of the Colorado Supreme Court Decision Don’t Matter” as long as Trump is barred from office”; and of course MSNBC.
One New York Review article was amplified by Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe, who called it a “devastating demonstration of how disgracefully dumb and anti-democratic the pundits’ case for keeping Trump on the ballot in democracy’s name truly is.”
Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig was one of the first legal analysts to call Colorado’s move “masterful.”
“It was brilliant, and it is an unassailable interpretation of the 14th Amendment,” he told MSNBC in December, nearly three months before SCOTUS ruled the opposite.
Luttig later told CNN the Colorado ruling was “a straightforward application of the 14th amendment in plain terms.”
Lincoln Project Founder and lawyer George Conway III, Off Message’s Brian Beutler, former New York Assistant Attorney General and current corporate media legal commentator Tristan Snell, and former Secretary of Labor and Democrat lawyer Robert Reich also expressed support for the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. All claimed it was legally solid.
Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling, those who celebrated the blue state’s move to deny voters the possibility of voting for Democrat’s No. 1 enemy refused to admit defeat. Instead, they criticized the “final arbiter of the law” for refusing to help Democrats further destroy U.S. rule of law.
CNN “legal scholar” Norm Eisen went so far as to suggest that because the Supreme Court “did NOT expressly challenge that he was an insurrectionist—& the concurrence emphasizes that finding,” the case for disqualifying Trump is still alive.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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