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      Trump asks US supreme court to keep election interference case frozen

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the US supreme court on Monday to keep on hold the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results while he prepares to challenge a recent appeals court ruling that found he was not immune from prosecution.The former US president also asked the nation’s highest court to stay the US court of appeals for the DC circuit order that prevented him from seeking what is known as an “en banc” rehearing of the case by the full bench of appeals judges.“President Trump’s application easily satisfies this Court’s traditional factors for granting a stay of the mandate pending en banc review and review on certiorari by this Court,” Trump’s lawyers John Sauer, John Lauro and Greg Singer wrote in the 110-page petition.The petition argued that Trump had met the key tests for the supreme court to grant a stay because there was a strong likelihood it would hear the case and because without a stay, Trump would suffer “irreparable injury” if the case proceeded to trial in the interim.“It is axiomatic that President Trump’s claim of immunity is an entitlement not to stand trial at all, and to avoid the burdens of litigation pending review of his claim,” the petition said.The filing broadly expounded earlier arguments Trump had made about presidential immunity, which his legal team has viewed as the best vehicle to delay the impending trial because it was a vehicle through which Trump could pursue an appeal before trial that also triggered an automatic stay.Trump has made it no secret that his strategy for all his impending cases is to seek delay – ideally beyond the 2024 election in November, in the hopes that winning a second presidency could enable him to pardon himself or direct his attorney general to drop the charges.For months, Trump has attempted to advance a sweeping view of executive power – that he enjoyed absolute immunity from prosecution because the conduct charged by the special counsel Jack Smith fell within the “outer perimeter” of his duties as president.The contention received short shrift from the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing his case in Washington and rejected his argument. It received similar treatment from a three-judge panel at the DC circuit, which categorically rejected his position.“We cannot accept former president Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power,” the unsigned but unanimous opinion from the three-judge panel said.“At bottom, former president Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three [government] branches,” the opinion said. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”But Trump’s lawyers have long viewed the immunity issue as more of a vehicle to stall the case from going to trial than an argument they would win on its merits. It was perhaps the only motion they could make that triggered an appeal before trial and came with an automatic stay.Trump was forced to appeal directly to the supreme court, instead of making an intermediary challenge that would cause further delay, after the DC circuit panel issued parameters on how Trump could use further appeals if he wanted the case to remain frozen.The panel ruled that Trump needed to petition the supreme court by Monday to keep the stay in place. The stay would remain until the supreme court either declined to hear the case or until it issued a judgment in the event it did agree to take up the matter.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat effectively foreclosed Trump from pursuing an “en banc” rehearing – which is where the full bench of judges at the DC circuit would reconsider the decision of the three-judge panel – since pre-trial proceedings under Chutkan would resume while he waited for the DC circuit to weigh in.Over the weekend, Trump’s chief appellate lawyer John Sauer prepared the application for a stay, a person familiar with the matter said.The concern in recent days among the Trump legal team has been whether the supreme court would agree to keep the case frozen while Trump made his final appeal, the person said. And even if they granted the stay, it remains unclear whether the supreme court would ultimately agree to take up the case.How the court moves next could decide whether Trump will go to trial on the federal election interference case before the 2024 presidential election. Recent public polls have shown that voters would be more inclined to vote for the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020, if Trump was convicted in this case.If the supreme court declines to hear the case, it would return jurisdiction to Chutkan in the federal district court in Washington. Chutkan scrapped the 4 March trial date she initially scheduled, but has otherwise shown a determination to proceed to trial with unusual haste.If the supreme court does accept the case, the question will be how quickly it schedules deadlines and arguments – and how quickly it issues a decision. The closer to the end of its term that the court issues a decision, the more unlikely a trial would take place before the election.The speed with which the supreme court moves has become important because Chutkan has promised Trump that he would get the full seven months to prepare his trial defense that she envisioned in her original scheduling order that set the 4 March trial date. More

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      Steve Bannon hawks disinformation to support Trump as legal troubles mount

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      The far-right strategist and Donald Trump loyalist Steve Bannon is again playing an influential role in the propaganda circles around the former US president as he bids to return to the White House, even as Bannon faces a barrage of legal problems.The conspiratorial Bannon, who spearheaded part of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as chief White House strategist in the first half of 2017, is waiting to see if a federal appeals court overturns his obstruction of Congress conviction. He also faces other legal problems from New York fraud charges, former lawyers and potentially other fronts.But at the same time he is pushing a tidal wave of election disinformation on his War Room podcast to help Trump win the presidency again and promote a Maga-heavy policy agenda as Trump and his allies plot out authoritarian-style plans for a second presidency.Ex-justice department prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans say Bannon’s odds of winning his obstruction of Congress appeal are long, and foresee more legal headaches ahead for the pugnacious Make America Great Again guru, while analysts warn that by spreading election falsehoods and other misinformation he endangers democracy.At present, the biggest legal threat confronting Bannon is his two-count federal conviction and a four-month jail sentence for defying a House panel subpoena for documents and testimony concerning the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.Last fall, Bannon appealed his contempt of Congress conviction for refusing the House subpoena, citing executive privilege and advice from a lawyer, even though he had long left the administration and the matters covered by the subpoena.Separately, Bannon is slated to be tried in May on New York charges of fraud and money laundering involving his key role in a private “We Build the Wall” Mexico venture that bilked thousands of investors out of about $25m, a scheme in which three Bannon associates have been convicted.Bannon last month sought to dismiss the charges, which alleged in part that $1m of the funds were improperly diverted to Bannon and a top associate, but Manhattan prosecutors wrote in a court filing that his argument “bears little resemblance to reality”.The charges by the Manhattan district attorney against Bannon, an alleged architect of the scheme to raise private funds for Trump’s abortive Mexico wall, mirror earlier ones from federal prosecutors against Bannon that Trump pardoned him for the night before leaving office.Experts say more legal scrutiny of Bannon could come on other fronts. The exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a Bannon ally and benefactor who last year was charged by federal prosecutors in a billion-dollar fraud case, was charged again in January for running a “criminal enterprise” that bilked Chinese American dissidents out of tens of millions of dollars.Guo allegedly promoted a cryptocurrency scam, propaganda and other businesses, plus financing a lavish lifestyle including purchasing a yacht, on which Bannon in 2020 was arrested on the federal Mexico wall project charges.Among the businesses linked to Guo in the superseding indictment was the conservative social media platform Gettr, which he helped finance and launch in 2021 and which Bannon’s War Room has profited from. Guo is slated to be tried in April.Bannon’s War Room podcast has reaped tens of thousands of dollars a month in ads from Gettr, according to a source familiar with its operations and news reports.War Room, which regularly hosts staunch Trump allies such as the congresswoman Elise Stefanik and the My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, last year was named the top promoter among political podcasts of misinformation about elections, Covid-19 and other issues, according to a Brookings Institution study.Unfazed, Bannon told the New York Times his top ranking was a “badge of honor … What they call disinformation or misinformation we consider the truth.”A key figure in promoting the January 6 Save America rally, Bannon proved prescient shortly before the insurrection on his War Room podcast when he said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”.Former justice department prosecutors and members of both parties say Bannon’s legal woes are mounting.“Like former president Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s sketchy business and political activities seem to be a magnet for criminal prosecutions and investigations,” said Paul Pelletier, an ex-acting chief of the Department of Justice’s fraud section.“With his criminal ‘Build the Wall’ fraud trial looming and his criminal contempt of Congress long-shot appeal pending, it appears Bannon’s penchant for associating with and profiting from unsavory characters and his own schemes will keep him busy fending off financial fraud investigations for the foreseeable future.“Bannon’s business and financial ties with Guo should certainly attract rigorous scrutiny,” he added.View image in fullscreenOther justice department alumni concur Bannon faces big legal headaches.“Bannon is nothing more than a garden variety fraudster,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “He had the benefit of a patron in the White House who rewarded his loyalty and protected him.” But with Trump gone, “he is now going to pay the price.“His appeal will not succeed and his criminal trial in New York will result in conviction. Only a Trump victory in November can save him from the federal [obstruction] case and even that won’t suffice to save him in New York.”Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the various criminal charges he faces, and his attorney Harlan Protass did not respond to calls for comment.Still, the ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent noted: “It’s absurd and nonsensical for Bannon to think he was protected by executive privilege for events that occurred when he was not a White House employee.”The Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a key member of the House panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s role in it, said: “Bannon seems to have been deeply enmeshed in the planning of the disruption of the peaceful transfer of power and the seizing of the presidency for Donald Trump.”Raskin noted: “Bannon is the intellectual ringleader of the Maga circus … In fact, he fancies himself not just the philosopher of white Christian nationalism in our country but the political strategist for allied autocrats and theocrats all over the world.”In that role, Bannon’s War Room podcast has loomed large, making him an influential figure in promoting Trump and Maga world views including falsehoods about the 2020 election and Covid-19.Bannon’s personal account shows he has nearly 7 million followers and on Gettr, where War Room is one of the most popular shows, more than 800,000 followers.Bannon’s close Gettr ties are underscored by his frequent mention of the platform on War Room. Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow in emerging technologies and AI who led its podcast research, said that Gettr was referenced, often multiple times, in more than 60% of more than 1,000 episodes reviewed.Trump allies who were on War Room multiple times last year included Stefanik, Lindell and the ex-justice department assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, with whom Trump plotted to promote fake electors in several states that Biden won.Bannon has touted Clark, an unindicted co-conspirator in the special counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment of Trump over his attempts to subvert the election results, as attorney general if the former president wins another term. Clark was also indicted along with Trump and 17 others by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s win in Georgia.“Bannon’s War Room stands out – with claims about votes being switched by Dominion machines to Sharpies being used to disenfranchise voters to the Covid-19 virus being a plot to deny Trump a second term, among many, many others,” Wirtschafter said.While Bannon’s War Room keeps pushing Maga misinformation, the bombastic strategist faces other financial and legal woes.Robert Costello, a former Bannon lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s pardon of the strategist, filed a claim against him last year for $480,000 in monies owed. Costello and his firm won a summary judgment from New York’s supreme court to obtain payment, but Bannon, with Protass’s help, is fighting the ruling.Interestingly, Protass in a court filing last month wrote that an effort by Costello’s firm to access Bannon’s bank account and depose him “poses a significant risk of compromising” his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination with fraud charges against him pending in New York.Regarding Bannon’s upcoming Mexico wall fraud trial, Raskin said: “Given that three associates of Bannon have been convicted of the conduct charged in these events, it has to be a serious threat to Bannon too.”Bannon’s multiple legal problems do not surprise Raskin. “He has adopted the persona of bad boy lawlessness. Like Trump, Bannon considers himself way beyond the reach of the law.” More

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      US supreme court justices have strange views on whether Trump is disqualified | Moira Donegan

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      Elena Kagan once referred to Jonathan Mitchell sarcastically as “some genius”. That was in oral arguments surrounding SB8, the bounty-hunter abortion ban that Texas succeeded in passing before the overturn of Roe v Wade, which Mitchell wrote, pioneering a cockamamie scheme for evading judicial review.Mitchell, a far-right lawyer currently vying for a spot in the second Trump administration, is a fan of this kind of bald, legal bad faith: you can’t quite call him duplicitous, because he never quite pretends that the law really leads him to the conclusions he’d like to reach. He’s more about coming up with novel legal schemes to get to his desired outcome and trusting that the federal judiciary, captured as it is by Federalist Society acolytes and wingnut cranks, will go along with him because they share his political proclivities.That’s what worked for him with SB8: the supreme court allowed Texas’s abortion ban to go into effect long before Dobbs: not because Mitchell made a convincing argument, but because he offered them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.Something similar happened in Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v Anderson, a question about whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office under section three of the 14th amendment.The case reached the supreme court after a Colorado court found that Trump’s actions on January 6 disqualified him. The court wanted to disagree and was desperate to find a way to restore Trump to the Colorado ballot without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump committed an insurrection or not. Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, gave them very little help: he gave a shoulder-shrugging argument to the justices, after filing a bizarre and strained brief that primarily focused on the absurd claim that the president is not an “officer.” Left to their own devices, the justices went fishing, looking for an argument that could plausibly allow them to exit the case, since Mitchell did not provide them one.The winning entry came from Justice Samuel Alito, who first offered the suggestion that a state like Colorado did not have the authority to enforce section three of the 14th amendment without congressional permission. The rest of the justices seemed to like the sound of that and were soon all asking questions about the scope of state authority over the administration of federal elections.It was a bit of an odd argument: the court recently came close to embracing a much more wide-reaching vision of the authority of state legislatures to govern federal elections in their borders, in its address of a rightwing legal curiosity called the “independent state legislature theory”. And the notion that section three of the 14th amendment requires congressional action to go into effect is on its own peculiar: no other section of the amendment has been found to require such instigating legislation from Congress, and the language of the amendment itself suggests that the disqualification of onetime insurrectionists is something that Congress has to act to turn off, but not to turn on.It is strange, too, that the court, which in past years has made dramatic and ruinous changes to American life out of its professed loyalty to our nation’s “history and traditions”, chose to more or less completely ignore the suggestions of history here. The 14th amendment’s section three has seldom been enforced – in part because of the rarity of insurrections – and so there are few impediments to the court’s self-styled originalists delving headfirst into the history of the amendment’s intention and context.But instead the justices chose to dismiss the considerable evidence that the framers of the 14th amendment intended section three to be used precisely to protect the republic from a figure like Trump. They attend themselves instead not to the lessons of the past, but to the incentives of the present.By the end of the arguments, it was clear: what the justices will write will be a 9-0 or 8-1 decision (only Sonia Sotomayor voiced much dissent) saying that section three is not self-enacting, or at any rate that the states cannot enact it themselves. They will have arrived at this conclusion not because the argument was made persuasively or at all by Trump attorney Mitchell – it wasn’t – and not because it is the place where the text compels them to arrive – it isn’t. They will instead have fabricated this reasoning out of whole cloth, because it gets them out of an inconvenient question: the question of whether the constitution’s substantive protections for democracy can withstand the stress Trump applies to them.One point that several of the justices touched on, and which has been taken up by those skeptical of the Colorado case and similar efforts to disqualify Trump from office on 14th amendment grounds, is the notion that his disqualification would be somehow anti-democratic, disenfranchising the people who would like to vote for him and would not get a chance to.But democracy means more than the simple ability to vote; it requires a commitment to constitutional principles – to the limits of an office, to the rights of the minority, to the separation of private and public interests among those in power and to the willingness to place the dignity of the country before the petty preferences of the man who leads it.Trump has no intention of upholding these principles. We know: he tells us all the time. To disqualify him would not be to undermine democracy but to protect it, by averting the seizure of the republic by the man who has been quite frank about his intention to destroy it.Meanwhile, section three of the 14th amendment now seems set to be orphaned – denied its status as self-effecting, curtailed in its enforcement by the states. If section three is still the law, and if insurrectionists are still barred from taking federal office, then how can this law be enforced? And that’s where the court, in its apparent effort to avoid having to take much of a stand on the issue, seems to have planted a loaded gun. Because if states can’t enforce the ban on insurrectionists in office, then only Congress can. And where would Congress do that? At the certification of the electoral votes – on 6 January 2025.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Consequences weigh heavily for justices at Trump 14th amendment hearing

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      In the end, the supreme court justices displayed little interest in the finer details of constitutional law, which normally pays their salaries and over which the country has been obsessing now for days.Who is an “officer of the United States”? Leave that to one side. Should the 14th amendment’s disqualification of insurrectionists in federal posts apply only to office holders or can it also be deployed against electoral candidates? Let’s come back to that.Even the big question – did Donald Trump engage in insurrection in luring his supporters to the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – barely got a look in at Thursday’s historic oral arguments. Only one of the nine justices, the liberal-leaning Ketanji Brown Jackson, asked a single question of Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, inviting him to state his position on such a vexed and burning issue.No, Trump did not, Mitchell predictably replied, in part because an insurrection had to be “an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government”. Jackson shot back with the forensic wit that in her 18 months on the mahogany bench has become her trademark.“And so a chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection,” she said. It was a rare moment of release in more than two hours of dense legal discussion.What the justices were, almost to an individual, concerned to talk about was what the consequences of their judgment would be, both for American democracy and for their own standing. Should they side with the Colorado supreme court, and remove Trump from the ballot, then what?Elena Kagan, another of the three liberal-leaning justices, wanted to know whether a victory for Colorado would effectively impose that state’s decision to cast Trump into the wilderness on the voters of all other states. “Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?” she pondered.Samuel Alito, one of the hard rightwingers on the court, wondered whether the logic of Colorado’s argument – that a federal office holder who committed insurrection should immediately and automatically be disqualified – would allow military officers to cease obeying a president’s orders from the Oval Office.John Roberts, the chief justice, looked inward, asking himself what the consequences of stripping Trump from the Colorado ballot would be for his own court. He painted a picture of a dystopian world in which a ruling that sided with Colorado would unleash a flood of partisan challenges from other states under the insurrection clause, each of them with different standards of proof and evidentiary rules.“In very quick order, a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, ‘You’re off the ballot’, and others, for the Republican candidate, ‘You’re off the ballot’, and it will come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”Not least for Roberts himself. “We will be deciding whether there was an insurrection when one president did something, as opposed to when somebody else did something else. So what do we do?”For Roberts, this was more than merely a question about possible future workload. It was far more existential than that: it was a heartfelt cry that the court should avoid being dragged into the contentious thick of presidential elections, where only grief could lie.As time ticked on, and the arguments continued, it became clear that the Roberts’ view – pragmatic, cautious, allergic to future controversy – was widely shared by almost all the justices. Such uniformity of opinion raises the prospect of a rapid decision in coming days, with an 8-to-1 vote or even 9-to-0 being eminently possible (the only point of uncertainty being the third liberal justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who contributed little).Such an outcome would make Roberts the second biggest winner of the day. He will hope that a unanimous or near-unanimous ruling on such an explosive issue will help redeem the court amid growing public skepticism over its many corruption scandals and blatantly partisan rightwing jurisprudence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe chief justice is only too well aware of the low esteem in which his court is already held by the American people, and he is desperate to avoid further slippage. A recent NBC News poll found that only 28% had a positive view of the justices, the lowest rating in the poll’s history.The biggest winner, of course, is Trump. Barring a major surprise, the court is all but certain to overturn the Colorado ruling and keep the former president back on the ballot. After the pounding he has taken from the courts in recent days, it will mark a rare – and no doubt heavily-exploited – victory.There is one other aspect to the winners and losers from Thursday’s deliberations, and it’s the most important one of all. How does democracy come out of all this?Brett Kavanaugh, one of three rightwing justices appointed by Trump, was clear that keeping the former president on the ballot was a win from democracy. “What about the idea that we should think about democracy, and the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice? Your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters,” he told the lawyer representing the Colorado plaintiffs, Jason Murray.It was one of several critical comments directed at Murray from the bench. But it invoked a parting warning from the lawyer.Should Trump win in November, the question of an insurrectionist returning to the White House will not have gone away. In words that may yet haunt the court, he said: “I think it could come back with a vengeance.” More

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      ‘We were a voice in the wilderness’: the groups fighting to keep Trump off the ballot

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      A US supreme court case that could remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is the culmination of several years of work by left-leaning watchdog groups to reinvigorate the 14th amendment and its power.A Colorado case that found Trump couldn’t run for re-election there was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), though other groups and individuals have filed lawsuits and petitions in many states trying to remove Trump under the 14th amendment’s third clause. The clause says that people who were in office and participated in an insurrection against the US can’t hold office again.Some of the challenges have gone through the courts, while others have appealed directly to elections officials in charge of placing candidates on the ballot. Colorado was the first ruling to decide against Trump, so it is headed to the supreme court at the former president’s behest. Because of how consequential and rare the issue is, it was expected that the high court would eventually be the arbiter of how the clause applied in the modern era.Crew, a non-profit that has focused in part on Trump corruption issues since he took office, researched the 14th amendment and found it was “really built for this moment”, said Noah Bookbinder, the organization’s president. The group first brought a test case against a local elected official in New Mexico who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Couy Griffin, then a county commissioner in Otero county, New Mexico, was removed from office for violating the 14th amendment.“We would have ideally liked to bring a number more of those kinds of cases to really establish more of a track record and some more precedent,” Bookbinder said. “Donald Trump sort of forced our hand because this was the person who had really, really landed this attack on a democracy.”Crew challenged Trump just in Colorado, which became the first state to rule Trump ineligible, but it isn’t the only group working on 14th amendment cases. Another non-profit has been working on keeping Trump off the ballot for several years.Free Speech for People, an advocacy non-profit founded in the wake of the Citizens United ruling in 2010, focused on Trump corruption cases soon after the former president took office. It was among the first groups to call for Trump’s impeachment.In 2021, Free Speech for People wrote letters to secretaries of state around the country alerting them to the 14th amendment and how it would affect Trump if he ran again. In 2022, Free Speech for People challenged several members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, on 14th amendment grounds, though the cases weren’t successful at preventing them from running. Once Trump was officially a candidate, the group filed lawsuits challenging his eligibility in Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Illinois and Massachusetts.“Back in the middle of 2021, we were kind of a voice in the wilderness,” said Ben Clements, the board chair and senior legal adviser to Free Speech For People. “There wasn’t a lot of support for this view, and that’s obviously changed a lot.”The concept received a boost from two conservative law professors, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, who wrote a law review article in August 2023 arguing that Trump could not hold office again based on their reading of the constitution.Aside from the two major groups bringing cases, one man has filed lawsuits in various states without legal representation. John Anthony Castro, a Texas Republican and frequent candidate for various offices who says he is also running for president, has challenged Trump’s eligibility in the most states, with no success. Castro, a tax-return preparer, was recently indicted himself for filing false tax returns.And individual voters or groups of voters have challenged Trump’s eligibility in their states as well. In Maine, voters brought their challenge to the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who decided Trump should not be placed on the ballot there. Maine’s challenge is on hold pending the outcome of the supreme court case.Crew and Free Speech for People hope the supreme court gives a thorough ruling on all facets of the case to provide legitimacy for the court’s decision and indicate what should happen next. If Trump is removed from the ballot, challenges could pop up in many more states against the ex-president and others.“We really think as a legal and factual matter that the courts have to get into the meat of it,” Bookbinder, of Crew, said. “But we also think that that is better for the country for the court to give some clarity on the core issues.” More

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      US supreme court to hear arguments on keeping Trump off 2024 ballot

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      The US supreme court will hear oral argument on Thursday in one of the most high-stakes cases in American politics this century, thrusting a beleaguered court to the center of the 2024 election.The court is considering whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president. The novel legal question at the heart of the case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, is whether the 14th amendment to the constitution prohibits Trump from holding office because of his conduct on 6 January 2021. Section 3 of the amendment says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to protect the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection cannot hold office. That ban, the amendment says, can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.There is no precedent for the case. The 14th amendment, enacted after the civil war, has never been used to challenge the eligibility of a presidential candidate, but the idea began picking up steam after two conservative legal scholars published a 126-page law review article last summer arguing the amendment clearly disqualified Trump.A group of Colorado voters sued under the law last year, relying on the theory to try to disqualify Trump from the ballot. After a five-day trial, a Colorado district court judge said Trump had committed insurrection, but was not disqualified because he was not an officer of the United States. The Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling in December, removing Trump from the ballot in a 4-3 decision. While lawsuits have been filed in dozens of other states seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far.The justices accepted a request from Trump to hear the case and expedited its review because of Colorado’s fast approaching 5 March primary. The compressed schedule and likely quick turnaround of the case means that oral argument – currently set for 80 minutes on Thursday – could offer an unusual level of insight into how the justices are weighing the arguments.“I feel more at sea than I usually do,” said Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Los Angeles, who co-authored an amicus brief urging the court to rule definitively on the case now. “There are a million ways the court can go. The court has given no signal, at all, as to which of those directions it wants to go in. And so, more than usual, I’m going to be very closely listening to the oral arguments to see which arguments are resonating with which justices.”The case also arrives at a perilous moment for the court itself. Public confidence in the court has been declining, exacerbated by a series of ethics scandals and controversial decisions that came down along ideological lines. The court is essentially now seen as a political body and as a result, the betting money seems to be that they will find a way to keep him on the ballot. Trump appointed three of the six justices in the supermajority on the body.“I don’t think it wants to be involved in these disputes. I think, on a bipartisan basis, there’s an interest on staying as far away from these issues as possible,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote an amicus brief in the case that wasn’t in support of either party.Trump’s lawyers offer five reasons to the court for why he should not be disqualified from the ballot. First, they argue that the word “officer” in the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency. His lawyers also argue that his conduct on 6 January did not amount to insurrection and that the 14th amendment cannot be enforced absent implementing legislation from Congress. Last, they say, the Colorado supreme court cannot invent its own criteria for running for president nor can it interfere with the method the legislature has chosen for selecting presidential electors.The idea that the president isn’t an officer is nonsensical, lawyers for the six Colorado voters – four Republicans and two independents – who filed the case wrote in their own brief. “Section 3 does not give a free pass to insurrectionist former Presidents. The Constitution says the Presidency is a federal ‘office’. The natural meaning of ‘officer of the United States’ is anyone who holds a federal ‘office’,” they write.Trump’s arguments to the court essentially amount to the idea that “somehow there’s a Donald Trump specific loophole”, said Donald Sherman, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the Colorado voters.“Donald Trump’s arguments are not about January 6. They’re not about the fundamental goal of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction amendments, or the 14th amendment. Or section 3. They’re basically about creating an exception that allows Donald Trump to wriggle out of accountability.”They also point out that Trump’s conduct on 6 January would have clearly been understood to amount to insurrection by the framers of the 14th amendment. “The original public meaning of “engag[ing] in” insurrection extends to those who organize and incite it,” they wrote.The brief also notes that the federal constitution gives states the power to only allow candidates who are qualified to appear on the ballot – no federal legislation is necessary to enforce that.“The more I spend time on this case, the harder it seems for Trump,” Muller said. “I don’t think the court is interested in one-offs. The notion that the Colorado supreme court got Colorado law wrong is not gonna interest the court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe challengers in the case have been bolstered by amicus briefs from historians who argue that the public would have understood the 14th amendment to apply to the president and to cover the kind of conduct Trump engaged in. Those kinds of arguments could hold sway with the court’s conservative justices who are professed adherents of originalism – understanding the constitution through its original public meaning.Hasen predicted the court would try to resolve the case without addressing of whether Trump engaged in insurrection – the most politically charged issue in the case.“I was thinking what are ways the court can side with Trump without weighing in on the merits of whether he committed insurrection,” he said. “One of them is Congress has to pass a statute [to enforce the disqualification provision]. If I had to lay down money on how Trump would win if he wins, I guess I’d put a few dollars down on that, but I’m not betting the farm.”A ruling upholding the Colorado supreme court’s decision would not mean that Trump would be automatically kicked off the ballot in every US state. Instead, each state would probably have to have its own legal proceedings to determine whether or not he should appear. Some states have already rejected such efforts ahead of the primary, setting up a potentially confusing and chaotic legal sprint to the general election.“I think people think if they say he’s ineligible it’s gonna end it, but it’s not,” Muller said. “It would be a state-by-state basis in the primary. He could still win the primary so there’s this whole separate layer of what the RNC would do at a convention if its candidate would be kept off the ballot in some states.”At the core of the case are two competing ideas of democracy. Trump and his attorneys argue that any effort to kick him off the ballot would be anti-democratic since it would prevent voters from choosing their preferred candidate for the presidency.“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.The challengers and their supporters argue that protecting democracy requires banning those who attempt to subvert democracy from holding higher office. “Our democracy is not a chaotic free-for-all in which anyone can be elected. The voters are entitled to decide within the framework of the applicable rules,” the good government group Common Cause wrote in an amicus brief supporting the challengers.“If Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (“Section 3”) is not enforced in this case, there is a genuine risk that our system of government will not survive,” they wrote. More

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      in Elections

      Trump is not immune from prosecution in 2020 election interference case, court rules

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      A federal appeals court panel has decided to reject Donald Trump’s arguments that he cannot be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results because it involved actions he took while president.While hearing oral arguments in Washington DC on 9 January, the three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit had expressed skepticism with Trump’s claim to immunity, while the former US president looked on in the court room. On Tuesday they rejected the claim.Last year, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, which charged the former president over his efforts to reverse the 2020 election, including by advancing fake slates of electors and obstructing Congress on 6 January 2021.The motion was rejected by the trial judge, prompting Trump to appeal to the DC circuit. The special counsel sought to bypass the potentially lengthy appeals process by asking the US supreme court to intervene directly, but the nation’s highest court returned the case to the appeals court.The ruling has been issued by the panel, which includes one judge appointed under George HW Bush’s presidency and two chosen by Joe Biden.The very legal process itself is acting as a hindrance to the prosecution in the federal criminal case and playing into Trump’s hands.Observers before the decision came down viewed a long-shot ruling in Trump’s favor as an obvious, significant blow to Smith – while a ruling that Trump is not immune would mean him appealing to the full DC circuit and then potentially the US supreme court, causing huge delay in the case amid the primaries and thrusting the conservative-leaning highest court into the middle of the presidential election.The appeal the panel just ruled on arose after the DC federal judge Tanya Chutkan in early December rejected Trump’s claim, based on his sweeping and unprecedented interpretation of executive power, that she should dismiss the case. She ruled that he enjoyed no immunity from prosecution simply because when the actions in question took place when he was still president.A grand jury indicted Trump last August, accusing him of conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, in the case brought by the Department of Justice-appointed Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe charges relate to Trump’s wide-ranging efforts after losing the 2020 election to Biden to overturn the results, campaigning in vain in court, in the media and by pressuring election officials in swing states, culminating in his encouragement of supporters on 6 January 2021, to stop the certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which led to the deadly invasion of the US Capitol.Trump faces 91 charges in four separate criminal cases, two federal, one in New York and one in Georgia. More

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      in US Politics

      Nearly half of US wants Trump election subversion verdict before November, poll says

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      Nearly half of those in the US want to see Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case resolved before the former president runs for the White House again in November, according to a poll published on Monday.Meanwhile, a quarter of Americans do not think Trump will ever concede if he loses a second time to Joe Biden, said the survey, commissioned by CNN.The survey in question found that 48% of those polled believed it was “essential” for there to be a verdict before November’s election. Another 16% said that they would at least prefer to see one.CNN’s poll also showed that expectations Trump would concede if he loses have dropped from 37% to 25% since October – and more than three-quarters (78%) think the former president would try to pardon himself of federal charges stemming from his presidency if he wins another stint in the Oval Office.Trump has been performing strongly in polls as compared with Biden. A survey by NBC News released on Sunday found that Biden is beset by a deficit of 20 percentage points against Trump in his handling of the economy, despite signs that the US may have achieved an almost unique “soft-landing” after a government and consumer spending boom during the Covid-19 pandemic.The poll also found that fewer than three in 10 voters approve of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war. And Biden lags Trump by 16 points on the perception of competence and effectiveness, a reversal from 2020.But the question of Trump’s legal quagmire hangs over Biden’s unfavorable polling. The former president is facing more than 90 criminal charges accusing him of trying to illegally nullify his defeat by Biden, illicitly retaining government secrets after leaving the White House and making illegal hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump.If Trump is convicted of a felony, the poll found, a five-point lead for Trump flips to a two-point lead for Biden.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.On Friday, the US district judge Tanya Chutkan formally postponed the federal election interference case against Trump over which she is presiding. It was scheduled to begin in March, but that date has been pushed back while a Washington DC appeals court weighs arguments from the Trump legal team that he is immune from prosecution for actions taken while he was president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the DC appeals court rejects Trump’s appeal, it will probably advance to the US supreme court, meaning further trial delays.Public desire for a resolution to that case before the November election comes as recent polling by Bloomberg found majorities of voters in seven key swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime (53%) or sentenced to prison (55%) in one of the four cases against him overall.But, according to CNN, views of Trump’s efforts to stay in office despite his 2020 defeat in effect remain unchanged from the summer of 2022, with 45% of US adults saying he acted illegally, 32% unethically, and 23% that he did nothing wrong at all. More