US Supreme Court restores Donald Trump to election ballots
The US Supreme Court has delivered its verdict on whether Donald Trump can be stopped from seeking re-election for his role in the deadly January 6 riot.
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Former US president Donald Trump will be allowed to contest this year’s election, with America’s highest court rejecting a state’s bid to disqualify him for sparking an insurrection after his 2020 defeat.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, which was hailed by Mr Trump as a “big win for America”, protects the likely Republican candidate from any further efforts to remove him from the ballot for a rematch with President Joe Biden.
It also averts an unprecedented crisis in which only voters in certain states could vote for Mr Trump, who is currently the frontrunner to win in November and return to the White House.
The court did not cast judgment on whether the former president’s actions after the 2020 election – including his role in sparking the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol – constituted a breach of the US Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office.
Instead, it said only Congress could enforce that rule, not the states.
Mr Trump had taken the case to the Supreme Court after a Colorado court issued an explosive ruling late last year to remove him from the ballot.
He praised the verdict on Monday (local time), saying: “You cannot take someone out of a race because an opponent would like to have it that way.”
“While most states were thrilled to have me, there were some that didn’t, and they didn’t want that for political reasons,” Mr Trump said.
“You can’t do what they tried to do.”
Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold said she was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s judgment, adding that her state “should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot”.
All nine justices on America’s top court agreed on the historic decision, although the three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – criticised the majority ruling for going further to “decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this court and petitioner from future controversy”.
They argued that by deciding that Congress would have to pass legislation to enact the constitutional ban on insurrectionists, the court was attempting to “insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding public office”.
“In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course,” the liberal justices said of the majority ruling.
Mr Trump had also been disqualified from the ballot in Illinois and Maine, while his lawyers successfully fought off similar efforts in other states.
The Supreme Court rushed its decision ahead of Super Tuesday this week, when voters in 15 states – including Maine and Colorado – will vote on whether Mr Trump should be the Republican Party’s candidate.
He has already romped through the primary process and is expected to lock up the nomination this month.
The Supreme Court is also set to decide within months on Mr Trump’s claim of immunity to protect himself from prosecution in a criminal case brought over his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.
The former president turned up the heat on the justices to overturn a lower court’s finding against him, saying the US “won’t have a president” if full immunity was not granted to whoever sat in the Oval Office.
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Originally published as US Supreme Court restores Donald Trump to election ballots
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