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      Only Voters Can Truly Disqualify Trump

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      Intense debate has accompanied the decision by the Supreme Court to review the decision by Colorado’s highest court to bar Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballots based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — about the precise meaning of the word “insurrection,” the extent of Mr. Trump’s culpability for the events of Jan. 6 and other legal issues.I’m not going to predict how the Supreme Court will rule, or whether its ruling will be persuasive to those with a different view of the law. But there’s a critical philosophical question that lies beneath the legal questions in this case. In a representative democracy, the people are sovereign, and they express their sovereignty through representatives of their choice. If the courts presume to pre-emptively reject the people’s choice, then who is truly sovereign?The question of sovereignty was central to the purpose of the 14th Amendment in the first place. The Civil War — unquestionably an armed insurrection — was fought because of slavery. That was the reason for the war.But its justification was a dispute over sovereignty, whether it resided primarily with the people of the individual states or with the people of the United States, who had established the Constitution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Biden Campaign Sharpens Its Post-Roe Message: Abortion Is About Freedom

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      In events next week, the president and vice president will argue that abortion access is crucial to personal freedoms, and warn of what is at stake if Donald J. Trump is re-elected.President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will headline events next week centered around protecting abortion rights, throwing more heft behind an issue that has galvanized voters in the 18 months since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.On Monday, Ms. Harris will visit Wisconsin to begin a national tour focused on preserving access to reproductive health care as Republicans call for more restrictions. Then on Tuesday, she will join Mr. Biden at a rally for abortion rights in Virginia, where Democrats recently took control of the state legislature and have proposed to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution.Ms. Harris offered a preview of the administration’s election-year messaging to Americans when she visited “The View,” the most popular daytime talk show in the country.“We are not asking anyone to abandon their personal beliefs,” she said during an appearance on Wednesday, adding that “the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.”The idea that preserving access to abortion is tantamount to preserving personal freedoms has been embraced by Biden administration officials, lawmakers and activists who hope it will energize a flagging base and draw independent voters into the fold. They also want to contrast the administration’s policies with the political peril that the Republican Party faces by embracing hard-line measures.“I start from the place that most Americans believe that women should have the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, including abortion, without government interference,” Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, who traveled to the Iowa caucuses as a surrogate for Mr. Biden, said in an interview. (About 69 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, according to a Gallup poll last year.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Maine Secretary of State to Appeal Ruling on Her Decision to Exclude Trump From Ballot

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      Shenna Bellows said she intended to appeal the ruling by a state Superior Court judge that placed on hold her decision to exclude Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot.Maine’s top election official said on Friday she intended to appeal the ruling by a state Superior Court judge this week that placed on hold her decision to exclude former President Donald J. Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot.In a statement, the official, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, said she welcomed the guidance of the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to hear arguments on a similar case on Feb. 8. But in the meantime, she said, she will seek the input of Maine’s highest court.“I know both the constitutional and state authority questions are of grave concern to many,” Ms. Bellows wrote in a short statement on Friday. “This appeal ensures that Maine’s highest court has the opportunity to weigh in now, before ballots are counted, promoting trust in our free, safe and secure elections.”In a ruling late Friday, the chief justice of Maine’s highest court, Valerie Stanfill, described the lower court’s order as “generally not appealable.” She ordered Ms. Bellows to provide an explanation by Tuesday on why an appeal should be not dismissed.Ms. Bellows, a Democrat elected by the State Legislature, ruled on Dec. 28 that Mr. Trump did not qualify for the state ballot in Maine because he engaged in insurrection by encouraging the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The 14th Amendment disqualifies government officials who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.Her decision made Maine the second state to bar him from the ballot, after a Colorado court reached the same conclusion. Similar ballot challenges have been filed in at least 35 states; many remain unresolved though the primary season is already underway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars, Captured by Camera

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      An exhibit at the Jewish Museum features photos of collars worn by the late Supreme Court justice.Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at an exhibition of photographs of the collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore. We’ll also look at a Manhattan Democrat whose City Hall hopes were dashed in 2021 but who is now looking into challenging Mayor Eric Adams in 2025.Kris GravesIn the soft stillness of a museum gallery, you could forget that the photographs on the walls around you were shot under time pressure.Six minutes each, the photographer Elinor Carucci told me.The photographs, on view at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, are haunting, almost three-dimensional images of collars and necklaces that belonged to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Urges Supreme Court to Reverse Colorado Ballot Disqualification

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      The forceful brief was the former president’s main submission in his appeal of a ruling barring him from the Colorado primary ballot on the ground that he had engaged in insurrection.Former President Donald J. Trump urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to reverse a ruling barring him from the primary ballot in Colorado and to declare him eligible to seek and hold the office of the presidency.Mr. Trump’s brief, his main submission in an extraordinary case with the potential to alter the course of the presidential election, was a forceful recitation of more than half a dozen arguments about why the Colorado Supreme Court had gone astray in ruling him an insurrectionist barred from office by the Constitution.“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,” the brief said.The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly, perhaps by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.The case turns on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Judge Denies Effort to Remove Trump From the Ballot in Washington State

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      A judge in Washington State said on Thursday that former President Donald J. Trump’s name could remain on the state’s primary ballot. The ruling was the latest in a series of battles nationwide over whether Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat make him ineligible to hold the presidency again.A group of voters had filed a legal challenge asking state officials in Washington to leave Mr. Trump off the Republican primary ballot. But Judge Mary Sue Wilson said that Washington’s secretary of state had acted “consistent with his duties” by including Mr. Trump.Formal challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 35 states, according to a New York Times review of court records and other documents. So far, he has been disqualified in only two states: Colorado, by an appeals court ruling, and Maine, by the secretary of state.The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Mr. Trump’s appeal of the Colorado decision on Feb. 8. The case could determine his eligibility for the ballot nationally.Tracking Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 BallotSee which states have challenges seeking to bar Donald J. Trump from the presidential primary ballot.As in other states, the voters in Washington argued that Mr. Trump’s actions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol made him ineligible for office under the 14th Amendment. Steve Hobbs, the secretary of state and Washington’s top election official, has said he does not believe that he has the power to remove Mr. Trump from the primary ballot on his own.But Mr. Hobbs has said that court rulings could change his decision. A lawyer representing his office asked Judge Wilson on Thursday for a prompt ruling on the challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility, because ballots would be going out later this month to voters in the military and overseas.A lawyer representing the state Republican Party argued that the case brought by voters was flawed for technical reasons, and also because federal courts had not convicted Mr. Trump of any criminal conduct that would disqualify him.The issue could return after the primary, depending on Mr. Trump’s legal fortunes. Washington State law allows a voter to seek the removal of a candidate from the general election ballot if that candidate has been convicted of a felony, and Mr. Trump faces 91 felony charges as part of various criminal cases against him.In her ruling, Judge Wilson declined, for now, to rule on Mr. Trump’s eligibility for the general election in November.Lazaro Gamio More

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      The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs

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      The history of voting in the United States shows the high costs of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many of the problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.The framers were skeptical of universal voting. The original U.S. Constitution provided for voting only for the House of Representatives, not for the Senate or the presidency, leaving voter qualifications for House elections to the states. Later amendments framed voting protections in the negative: If there’s going to be an election, a state may not discriminate on the basis of race (15th Amendment), gender (19th Amendment) or status as an 18-to-20-year old (26th Amendment).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A Potentially Huge Supreme Court Case Has a Hidden Conservative Backer

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      The case, to be argued by lawyers linked to the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch, could sharply curtail the government’s regulatory authority.The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday that, on paper, are about a group of commercial fishermen who oppose a government fee that they consider unreasonable. But the lawyers who have helped to propel their case to the nation’s highest court have a far more powerful backer: the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch.The case is one of the most consequential to come before the justices in years. A victory for the fishermen would do far more than push aside the monitoring fee, part of a system meant to prevent overfishing, that they objected to. It would very likely sharply limit the power of many federal agencies to regulate not only fisheries and the environment, but also health care, finance, telecommunications and other activities, legal experts say.“It might all sound very innocuous,” said Jody Freeman, founder and director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former Obama White House official. “But it’s connected to a much larger agenda, which is essentially to disable and dismantle federal regulation.”The lawyers who represent the New Jersey-based fishermen, are working pro bono and belong to a public-interest law firm, Cause of Action, that discloses no donors and reports having no employees. However, court records show that the lawyers work for Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by Mr. Koch, the chairman of Koch Industries and a champion of anti-regulatory causes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More