SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 2/5/2024
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Thursday in what is shaping up to be the biggest election case since its ruling nearly 25 years ago in Bush v. Gore. At issue is whether former President Donald Trump, who is once again the front runner for the Republican nomination for president, can be excluded from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
Although the question comes to the court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the court’s ruling could be much more far-reaching. Maine’s secretary of state ruled in December that Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and challenges to Trump’s eligibility are currently pending in 11 other states. Trump warns that the efforts to keep him off the ballot “threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans” and “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead.” But the voters challenging Trump’s eligibility counter that “we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”
History behind the caseThe dispute hinges on the interpretation of a relatively obscure provision of the Constitution: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which (as relevant in this case) provides that no one “shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State,” if that person had previously sworn, “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States” to support the U.S. Constitution but then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the federal government.
Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 was intended to disqualify individuals who had served in the federal (or state) government before the Civil War and had sworn to uphold the Constitution but then supported the Confederacy. The bar on service can only be overcome by a two-thirds vote of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/supreme-court-to-decide-whether-insurrection-provision-keeps-trump-off-ballot/