Donald Trump has achieved a huge court win which means individual states can’t disqualify him from running for President.
It comes one day before so-called “Super Tuesday,” where voters in 15 states will decide who should be the Republican candidate for US President.
On social media, Mr Trump said the ruling was a “big win for America”.
Three US states – Colorado, Maine and Illinois – had ruled Mr Trump could not be on ballot papers because he engaged in an insurrection.
But the US Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, ordered the former president’s name back on the ballot in Colorado. The decision applies nationwide so also impacts Maine and Illinois.
The US Supreme Court decision means former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump is not barred from standing. Picture: Saul Loeb / AFP
Unanimous decision
Although the Supreme Court has both conservative and liberal judges, the ruling was unanimous from all justices. That calls into question the legal advice that led to Colorado’s ban in the first place.
The order found that only Congress, and not individual states, can disqualify candidates for federal office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, known colloquially as the Insurrection Clause or the Disqualification Clause, reported the New York Post.
“The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court … cannot stand,” the order read.
“All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”
The judges, however, did not make a call on whether Mr Trump had indeed caused an insurrection.
During oral arguments on February 8, the majority of the justices had signalled openness to reversing a December decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to kick Mr Trump off the primary ballot.
The Colorado Republican Party appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, while Mr Trump’s lawyers appealed the decision by Maine’s secretary of state and an Illinois judge to disqualify him.
The Supreme Court made the unusual choice to announce the order while not taking the bench, implying that the justices believed it necessary to redress the move before Super Tuesday.
At least one-third — 854 of 2429 — of all Republican delegates will be up for grabs during the March 5 contest.
Mr Trump has already won 244 delegates, while former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has nabbed 19.
The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, DC. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP
Trump’s reaction
Speaking after the decision from his home Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, Mr Trump said the ruling would: “go a long way toward bringing our country together, which our country needs”.
“(The Supreme Court) worked long, they worked hard and frankly, they worked very quickly on something that will be spoken about 100 years from now and 200 years from now.
“Essentially, you cannot take somebody out of a race because an opponent would like to have it that way,” he said.
A December 13 ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court removed Mr Trump from the primary ballot, citing his violation of the insurrection clause of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The Civil War-era amendment barred former Confederate officers from being elected to Congress if they had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the US.
Four of the seven Colorado Supreme Court justices ruled that Mr Trump’s actions in the lead-up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which halted the certification of the 2020 presidential election, constituted insurrection.
But the unprecedented move to use the clause to determine the eligibility of a leading presidential candidate concerned some legal scholars, who argued the Supreme Court should swiftly overturn the decision.
Jason Murray, the lead lawyer for the Colorado voters in the lawsuit, walks past anti-Trump demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court. Picture: Roberto Schmidt / AFP
Mr Trump’s legal counsel made the same case in oral arguments last month before the high court, while also pointing out the insurrection clause was meant to be enforced by Congress – reasoning that the justices suggested was sound.
“It’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” Chief Justice John Roberts said at the time. “That’s a pretty daunting consequence”.
“The question you have to confront,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan also told lawyer Jason Murray, who represented Colorado voters seeking to remove Mr Trump from the ballot, “is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”.
Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Mr Trump last August for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Washington, DC, but opted to prosecute the former president for obstructing an official proceeding, not inciting an insurrection.
Mr Trump is currently the runaway frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, having won all but one of the primary elections.
Ms Haley, 52, won her first nominating contest in deep blue DC on Sunday night.
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