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      G.O.P. Senate Group Files Brief in Support of Trump’s Colorado Ballot Appeal

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      The top Republican Senate campaign group filed a brief on Wednesday with the United States Supreme Court in support of Donald J. Trump’s appeal of a Colorado ruling blocking him from the state’s presidential ballot. It is the latest sign of the rallying effect that the former president’s legal woes are having on his party.The National Republican Senatorial Committee argued in its amicus brief that the Colorado Supreme Court had overstepped its jurisdiction with a decision that threatened to “unleash electoral chaos” on the 2024 presidential race.“So even if the Colorado Supreme Court were correct that President Trump cannot take office on Inauguration Day, that court had no basis to hold that he cannot run for office,” the committee said in its court filing.Donald Trump secured endorsements from Representative Steve Scalise, right, the majority leader, on Tuesday, and from Representative Tom Emmer, left, on Wednesday.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressThe filing from the group, the official party arm that oversees Senate races, underscores how Republicans — like the Trump campaign — are seeking to convert the former president’s court troubles into political assets. With the Iowa caucuses, the first presidential nominating contest, less than two weeks away, Mr. Trump is aiming to hold back challenges from former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Primary polls show that Republican voters, who had been largely skeptical of a third presidential campaign from Mr. Trump, have coalesced around him in the last year as he was charged with 91 felonies, mostly related to his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election.Mr. Trump has been securing Republican House leadership endorsements — from Representative Steve Scalise, the majority leader, on Tuesday, and from Representative Tom Emmer, the majority whip, on Wednesday.Senator Steve Daines, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is the only member of the Senate Republican leadership who has backed Mr. Trump. But the former president this week picked up a notable endorsement from Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican.The committee’s amicus brief was filed by a high-profile group of lawyers, several of whom worked in the Trump administration. That list includes Noel Francisco, the former solicitor general; John Gore, who was the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Hashim Mooppan, a former Justice Department lawyer who defended the ex-president’s travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries. More

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      Read Trump’s Appeal to the Supreme Court Over Colorado’s Ballot Ruling

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      ator John McCain, and Senator Ted Cruz held that the issue was for Congress and not the federal courts.

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      It would be beyond absurd-particularly in light of the Fourteenth Amendment’s enlargement of federal authority that this issue would be nonjusticiable by

      32. See, e.g., Castro v. N.H. Sec’y of State, Case No. 23-cv-416-JL, 2023 WL 7110390, at *9 (D.N.H. Oct. 27, 2023) (footnote omitted) aff’d on other grounds – F.4th —-, 2023 WL 8078010 (1st Cir. Nov. 21, 2023) (“[T]he vast weight of authority has held that the Constitution commits to Congress and the electors the responsibility of determining matters of presidential candidates’ qualifications.”); Robinson v. Bowen, 567 F. Supp. 2d 1144, 1147 (N.D. Cal. 2008) (“Arguments concerning qualifications or lack thereof can be laid before the voting public before the election and, once the election is over, can be raised as objections as the electoral votes are counted in Congress. The members of the Senate and the House of Representatives are well qualified to adjudicate any objections to ballots for allegedly unqualified candidates.”); Grinols v. Electoral College, No. 2:12-cv-02997-MCE-DAD, 2013 WL 2294885, at *5-7 (E.D. Cal. May 23, 2013) (“[T]he Constitution assigns to Congress, and not to federal courts, the responsibility of determining whether a person is qualified to serve as President of the United States.”); Grinols v. Electoral Coll., No. 12-CV-02997-MCE-DAD, 2013 WL 211135, at *4 (E.D. Cal. Jan. 16, 2013) (“These various articles and amendments of the Constitution make it clear that the Constitution assigns to Congress, and not the Courts, the responsibility of determining whether a person is qualified to serve as President.”); Taitz v. Democrat Party of Mississippi, No. 3:12-CV-280-HTW-LRA, 2015 WL 11017373, at *12–16 (S.D. Miss. Mar. 31, 2015) (“[T]hese matters are entrusted to the care of the United States Congress, not this court.”); Kerchner v. Obama, 669 F. Supp. 2d 477, 483 n.5 (D.N.J. 2009) (“The Constitution commits the selection of the President to the Electoral College in Article II, Section 1, as amended by the Twelfth Amendment and the Twentieth Amendment, Section 3,” and “[n]one of these provisions evince an intention for judicial reviewability of these political choices.”). More

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      Trump Asks Supreme Court to Keep Him on Colorado Ballot

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      The petition came in response to a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that the former president had engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office under the 14th Amendment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to keep him on the primary ballot in Colorado, appealing an explosive ruling from the state Supreme Court declaring him ineligible based on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.That ruling, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote, marked “the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.”Mr. Trump’s appeal adds to the growing pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to act, given the number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility and the need for a nationwide resolution of the question as the primaries approach.Read Trump’s Appeal to the Supreme Court Over Colorado’s Ballot RulingLawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said rulings in Colorado and Maine deeming him ineligible for the ballot required the U.S. Supreme Court to act.Read Document“The issues presented in this petition are of exceptional importance and urgently require this court’s prompt resolution,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.Mr. Trump’s petition followed a similar one last week from the Colorado Republican Party. The six voters who had prevailed in the Colorado Supreme Court filed a motion urging the justices to put the case on an exceptionally fast track.The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on requests to expedite its consideration of the case. It is likely to act on them in the coming days.The Colorado case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court’s docket or on the horizon. After an appeals court rules on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, the justices may consider that question. And they will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.In a ruling last week, an election official in Maine agreed with the Colorado court that Mr. Trump was ineligible for another term. Mr. Trump appealed the decision from Maine to a state court there on Tuesday. Both rulings are on hold while appeals move forward, giving the U.S. Supreme Court some breathing room.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the two rulings so far required the U.S. Supreme Court to act.“The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” they wrote. “Indeed, the Maine secretary of state, in an administrative proceeding, has already used the Colorado proceedings as justification for unlawfully striking President Trump from that state’s ballot.”Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the petition was “a strong legal document” that “raises some serious, difficult questions.”He added: “This is not to say that Trump has presented slam-dunk arguments that he should win; rather, these are arguments that merit consideration by the Supreme Court.”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.By a 4-to-3 vote, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that the provision applied to Mr. Trump, making him ineligible for another term.“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the majority wrote. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”Mr. Trump’s petition attacked the ruling on many grounds. It said the events culminating in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 were not an insurrection.“‘Insurrection’ as understood at the time of the passage of the 14th Amendment meant the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” the petition said, noting that the amendment had been adopted after “the United States had undergone a horrific civil war in which over 600,000 combatants died, and the very survival of the nation was in doubt.”“By contrast,” it added, “the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent.”Even if the events culminating in the Capitol riot could be called an insurrection, the petition said, Mr. Trump himself had not “engaged in insurrection.”The petition also said Section 3 did not apply to him because he had not taken the relevant kind of oath. And it said that the presidency was not one of the offices from which oath-breaking officials were barred.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that Section 3 disqualified people subject to it from holding office — not from seeking it. If the candidate were elected, the petition said, Congress could remove that disqualification before the candidate’s term began.The petition also argued that judges may not act unless Congress does. “Congress — not a state court — is the proper body to resolve questions concerning a presidential candidate’s eligibility,” it said.More broadly, Mr. Trump’s petition said voters rather than judges should assess whether his conduct disqualified him from a second term.The provision has never been used to disqualify a presidential candidate, but it has been the subject of cases involving other elected officials after the Jan. 6 attacks.A state judge in New Mexico ordered Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, removed from office under the clause. Mr. Griffin had been convicted of trespassing for entering a restricted area of the Capitol grounds during the attack.Another state judge, in Georgia, assuming that the Jan. 6 attacks were an insurrection and that participating in them barred candidates from office, ruled that the actions of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, did not meet the standard for removal from the ballot. More

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      Donald Trump’s Final Battle Has Begun

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      Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era, I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances. They’re often a showman’s cheap histrionics, a con man’s gaudy hyperbole.But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year, as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the “final battle.”I first heard Trump use that phrase in March, when he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. I laughed at his indefatigable self-aggrandizement. He said it again weeks later at a rally in Waco, Texas, not far from where the deadly confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal law enforcement officials took place. I cringed at his perversity.But as he continued to rave biblically about this “final battle,” my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins it all? He will probably play dictator for much longer than a day, and the America that he molds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we’ve known and loved until now.With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, a rematch of Trump and Joe Biden is highly likely — and wouldn’t be anything close to the usual competition between “four more years” and a reasonably sane, relatively coherent change of direction and pace. We’re on the cusp of something much scarier. Trump’s fury, vengefulness and ambitions have metastasized since 2020. The ideologues aligned with him have worked out plans for a second Trump administration that are darker and more detailed than anything in the first. He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla.And Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on a promise to unify the country and prides himself on bipartisanship, has recognized in his own way that “final battle” is apt. He has suggested that he is running again, at the age of 81, because the unendurable specter of Trump back in the White House leaves him no other choice. Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days.Trump talks that way all the time, ranting that we’ll “no longer have a country” if Biden and other Democrats are in charge. Biden’s warning about Trump is equally blunt, and it could assume ever greater prominence as he calculates how to win re-election despite widespread economic apprehension, persistently low approval ratings and attacks on his age and acuity.“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake in 2024,” he said at a campaign event in Boston last month. “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.”If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier.“There are people who don’t realize how dangerous 2024 could be,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and arguably Trump’s most prominent evangelical Christian critic, told me recently. “They’re assuming it’s a replay of 2020. I don’t think it is.”He wondered about the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, as a harbinger of worse political violence. He cited “the authoritarian rhetoric that’s coming from Trump.” He referred to the breadth of the chasm between MAGA America and the rest of it. When I asked him if he could think of any prior presidential elections suffused with this much dread and reciprocal disdain, he had to rewind more than 150 years, to the eve of the Civil War. “That’s the only precedent in American history I can see,” he said.It’s certainly possible that over the 10 long months between now and Election Day, there will be surprises that set up a November election with different candidates, different issues and a different temperature than the ones in place at the moment. It’s also possible that our politicians’ heightened language and intense emotions don’t resonate with most American voters and won’t influence them.“I see our political process pulling away from where people are on the ground,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy at Harvard who is an advocate of better civics education and more constructive engagement in civic life. “The political process has become a kind of theatrical spectacle, and on the ground, since 2016, we’ve seen this incredible growth of grass-roots organizations working on all kinds of civic health. I think people are getting healthier — or have been — over the past seven years, and our politics doesn’t reflect that.” She noted that in a growing number of states, there are serious movements to do away with party primaries, a political reform intended to counter partisanship and produce more moderate, consensus winners.But moderation and consensus are in no way part of Trump’s pitch, and if he’s on the ballot, striking his current Mephistophelian pose and taking his present Manichaean tack, voters are indeed being drawn into something that feels like a final battle or at least a definitive test — of the country’s belief in its institutions. Of its respect for diversity. Of its commitment to the law. Of its devotion to truth.Do a majority of Americans still believe in the American project and the American dream as we’ve long mythologized them? Do they still see our country as a land of opportunity and immigrant ingenuity whose accomplishments and promise redeem its sins? Do we retain faith in a more bountiful tomorrow, or are we fighting over leftovers? Those questions hover with a special urgency over the 2024 election.And that’s largely because of the perspective and agenda that Trump is asking voters to embrace. Even if the plans are bluster, the plea is a referendum on American values. He has said several times that immigrants “poison the blood” of our country, and a second Trump administration could involve the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants annually and large detention camps. In his response to his indictments in four cases comprising 91 felony counts, he has insisted that the justice system is corrupt and vowed to overhaul it to his liking and use it to punish political foes. He praises autocrats, equating brutal repression with strength and divorcing morality from foreign policy. He unabashedly peddles conspiracy theories, spinning falsehoods when provable facts are inconvenient or unflattering. He’d have us all live in fiction, just as long as the narrative exalts him.“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”We’d likely become a country with a new relationship to the rest of the world and a new attitude toward our history in it.“The Western liberal international order is the work of three-quarters of a century of eminent statesmen and both parties,” said Mark Salter, who was a longtime senior aide to Senator John McCain, has written many books on American politics and collaborated with Cassidy Hutchinson on “Enough,” her best-selling 2023 memoir about her time in Trump’s White House. “It has brought us times of unexpected prosperity and liberty in the world. And somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy or Donald Trump has got a better idea? It’s just ludicrous.”“I just have this feeling,” Salter told me, “that the next four years are going to be the most consequential four years in my lifetime.”Are our most generous impulses doing battle with our most ungenerous ones? That’s one frame for the 2024 election, suggested by the nastiness of so many of Trump’s tirades versus the appeals to comity and common ground that Biden still works into his remarks, the compassion and kindness he still manages to project. He celebrates American diversity and rightly portrays it as a source of our strength. Trump — and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis and many others in the current generation of Republican leadership — casts it as a threat.“Part of what’s in danger is American pluralism,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of the nonprofit group Interfaith America and the author of the 2022 book “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” “There was a consensus, from Kennedy to Obama, that diversity is part of what’s inspiring about America. Virtually every president in recent memory, with the exception of the guy in the Oval Office from 2017 to 2020, spoke about the virtues of American pluralism.”Trump speaks instead about persecuted Christians, persecuted white Americans, persecuted rural Americans. He beseeches them to exact vengeance. Where, Patel asked, does that leave “the American civic institutions that we just expect to work,” the basketball leagues and Cub Scout troops in which political affiliation and partisan recrimination took a back seat to joint mission? They could well break down. “We’re already seeing this in school boards,” he said. “We see this when a high school doesn’t just have to cancel a play but disband its theater department.”Jennifer Williams, a city councilwoman in Trenton, N.J., who made history a year ago when she was sworn as the first transgender person elected to any city council in the state, told me that while she identifies as Republican and has voted for Republican candidates in presidential elections past, the prejudices that Trump promotes terrify her. “My very existence as a human being and as an American is becoming more and more questioned,” she said.There’s a meanness in American life right now, and the way 2024 plays out could advance or arrest it. The outcome could also strain Americans’ confidence in our democracy in irreparable ways — and that’s not just because the Supreme Court may wind up determining Trump’s presence on the ballot, not just because the popular vote and the Electoral College could yield significantly different results, not just because any Trump loss would be attended by fresh cries of a “rigged” election and, perhaps, fresh incitements to violence.It’s also because so many voters across the ideological spectrum are so keenly frustrated and deeply depressed by the political landscape of 2024. They behold a Supreme Court that enshrines and protects ethically challenged justices and, as in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, seems wildly out of touch with the country. They have watched the House of Representatives devolve into a dysfunctional colosseum of dueling egos and wearying diatribes. They’re presented with candidates who seem like default options rather than bold visionaries. And they feel increasingly estranged from their own government.“That is so detrimental to our democracy,” said Stephanie Murphy, a moderate Florida Democrat who served in the House from 2017 to 2023 and was also one of the nine members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 rioting. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t agree on almost anything, but two-thirds agree that they don’t want to see a Trump-Biden rematch, and that’s what they’re getting.” There will be no real Democratic presidential primary. The Republican presidential primary, to judge by the polling, is an exercise so pointless that Trump hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the four debates so far. “You’re further disenfranchising people,” Murphy said, and you’re fostering “disillusionment among the American electorate that their vote even matters.”The irony is that in 2024, it will probably matter more than ever. How many Americans will see that, and how many will act on it? The final battle may be between resignation and determination, between a surrender of our ideals and the resolve to keep reaching for them, no matter how frequently and how far we fall short.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      How the Supreme Court May Rule on Trump’s Presidential Run

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      The legal issues are novel and tangled, experts said, and the justices may be wary of knocking a leading presidential candidate off the ballot.The Supreme Court, battered by ethics scandals, a dip in public confidence and questions about its legitimacy, may soon have to confront a case as consequential and bruising as Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush.Until 10 days ago, the justices had settled into a relatively routine term. Then the Colorado Supreme Court declared that former President Donald J. Trump was ineligible to hold office because he had engaged in an insurrection. On Thursday, relying on that court’s reasoning, an election official in Maine followed suit.An appeal of the Colorado ruling has already reached the justices, and they will probably feel compelled to weigh in. But they will act in the shadow of two competing political realities.They will be reluctant to wrest from voters the power to assess Mr. Trump’s conduct, particularly given the certain backlash that would bring. Yet they will also be wary of giving Mr. Trump the electoral boost of an unqualified victory in the nation’s highest court.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will doubtless seek consensus or, at least, try to avoid a partisan split of the six Republican appointees against the three Democratic ones.He may want to explore the many paths the court could take to keep Mr. Trump on state ballots without addressing whether he had engaged in insurrection or even assuming that he had.Among them: The justices could rule that congressional action is needed before courts can intervene, that the constitutional provision at issue does not apply to the presidency or that Mr. Trump’s statements were protected by the First Amendment.“I expect the court to take advantage of one of the many available routes to avoid holding that Trump is an insurrectionist who therefore can’t be president again,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard.Such an outcome would certainly be a stinging loss for Mr. Trump’s opponents, who say the case against him is airtight. But the Supreme Court would be attracted to what it would present as a modest ruling that allows Mr. Trump to remain on the ballot.“This is a fraught political issue,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “I think there will be an effort for the court to coalesce around a consensus position for a narrow, unanimous opinion. That probably means coalescing around a position where Trump stays on the ballot.”If there is a consensus among legal experts, it is that the Supreme Court must act.“For the sake of the country, we need resolution of this issue as soon as possible,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Republican primary voters deserve to know if the candidate they are considering supporting is eligible to run. Otherwise they waste their votes on an ineligible candidate and raise the risk of the party nominating an ineligible candidate in the general election.”Mr. Trump was disqualified in Colorado and Maine based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars officials who have taken an oath to support the Constitution from holding office if they then engage in an insurrection.Professor Stephanopoulos said those determinations were legally sound. But he added that he was “highly skeptical” that the Supreme Court, which has a six-justice conservative supermajority, would agree.“I think Roberts very much doesn’t want the court disrupting a presidential election, especially based on a novel legal theory that doesn’t have years of support from conservative judges and academics,” Professor Stephanopoulos said. “I also doubt that the court’s conservative justices want to start a civil war within the Republican Party by disqualifying the candidate whom most Republican voters support.”Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court has no options that will enhance its prestige.“Although many members of the public would of course embrace a decision affirming the Colorado Supreme Court,” she said, “others would recoil at the decision. I don’t think there is any way for the Supreme Court to issue a decision on this issue that will clearly enhance its legitimacy with the public as a whole.”Former President Donald J. Trump was disqualified from the Republican primaries in Colorado and Maine based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesShe proposed a general rule of thumb: “Whenever the Supreme Court considers a truly extraordinary constitutional case, it must confront at least two issues: first, what is the better answer to the legal question; and second, how confident are the justices in that answer.”“When it comes to cases that will have a massive impact on society,” she said, “one might assume that the confidence level has to be particularly high.”In her ruling on Thursday, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows of Maine wrote that the facts about Mr. Trump’s conduct were “not in serious dispute.”“The record establishes that Mr. Trump, over the course of several months and culminating on Jan. 6, 2021, used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power,” she wrote, adding: “The weight of the evidence makes clear that Mr. Trump was aware of the tinder laid by his multimonth effort to delegitimize a democratic election, and then chose to light a match.”Like the Colorado Supreme Court, Ms. Bellows put her ruling on hold while appeals move forward. That means the U.S. Supreme Court has some breathing room.The Colorado case is already before the justices in the form of a petition seeking review filed by the state’s Republican Party, which urged the court to resolve the case by March 5, when many states, including Colorado and Maine, hold primaries. Otherwise, they said, voters “will face profound uncertainty and the electoral process will be irrevocably damaged.”The six voters who prevailed in the Colorado case asked the justices to move even faster, culminating in a decision on the merits by Feb. 11.Professor Hasen said the ruling from Maine added to the need for prompt resolution.“The fact that a second state, at least for now, has ruled Trump ineligible for the ballot puts major pressure on the Supreme Court to intervene in the case and to say something about how to apply Section 3 to Trump,” he said. “The plaintiffs bringing these lawsuits are relentless, and they will keep trying to get Trump removed.”Agreeing to hear the case is one thing. Resolving it is another. As the Colorado Supreme Court recognized, there are at least eight discrete issues in the case, and the voters challenging Mr. Trump’s eligibility must prevail on all of them.“For Trump to win, he only needs to win on one issue,” Professor Muller said. “There are many options at the court’s disposal.”On the other hand, leading conservative law professors who have examined the original meaning of Section 3, which was adopted after the Civil War, have recently concluded that it plainly applies to Mr. Trump and bars him from another term. Such originalist arguments generally resonate with the court’s most conservative members.But other considerations may prevail.“As much as the court may want to evade politics in its decisions, it’s unavoidable,” Professor Muller said. “The best it can do right now is try to achieve consensus to avoid the appearance of partisanship.” More

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      in Elections

      The 14th Amendment Disqualification Was Not Meant for Trump

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      Challenges to disqualify Donald Trump from the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are popping up all over the country. On Thursday, the secretary of state of Maine ruled that Mr. Trump would be ineligible for the state’s primary ballot, a decision that can be appealed to the state’s Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled narrowly that the state will allow Mr. Trump to stay on the primary ballot — but left open a potential future challenge to his inclusion on a general-election ballot.But so far only one — the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that bars Mr. Trump from the primary ballot — has reached the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court.The Supreme Court should take the case and reverse the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, and do so for the very reason cited by the Colorado judges. According to the Colorado court (itself quoting an earlier, unrelated case), Section 3 should be interpreted “in light of the objective sought to be achieved and the mischief to be avoided.”That is exactly right. The Colorado court failed, however, to follow its own advice.When Congress passed the 14th Amendment, there wasn’t a person in the Senate or House who worried about loyal Americans electing a former rebel like Jefferson Davis as president. Instead, Republicans feared that the leaders of the late rebellion would use their local popularity to disrupt Republican Reconstruction policy in Congress or in the states. Section 3 expressly addressed these concerns and did so without denying loyal Americans their right to choose a president.To date, much of the debate over Section 3 has focused on whether the president is an “officer” who takes an “oath.” This is an issue in the second part of the provision. What neither scholars nor courts have yet focused on is first part of Section 3. The threshold issue is whether the framers and ratifiers thought that the president holds a “civil” office “under the United States.” This is a much more specific and historically difficult question.Here are the key opening words of Section 3: “No person 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 …”The text begins by expressly naming offices that rebel leaders might conceivably secure for themselves on the basis of their local popularity. The greatest fear was that these rebels would return to Congress and join Northern Democrats in thwarting Republican Reconstruction policy.As Representative Thaddeus Stevens warned his colleagues, without a properly worded Section 3, “that side of the House will be filled with yelling secessionists and hissing copperheads” — a reference to Northern Democrats who had opposed the Civil War. It was possible that a coalition of Southern and Northern Democratic presidential electors would nominate a “hissing copperhead.”Congressional Republicans were so concerned about mischief in the Electoral College that they delayed the passage of the 14th Amendment in order to make sure the issue was properly addressed. The Joint Committee’s draft of Section 3 prohibited rebels from voting for presidential electors, but this left open an enormous loophole. As Representative John Longyear pointed out, this prohibition would be “easily evaded by appointing electors of President and Vice President through their legislatures.”Senator Jacob Howard agreed that Section 3 would not “prevent state legislatures from choosing rebels as presidential electors,” and he led the effort to rewrite Section 3 in a manner that closed the loophole. The result is the final version that prohibits leading rebels from serving as presidential electors, whether elected or appointed.The only reason to secure a trustworthy Electoral College is in order to secure a trustworthy president. So Section 3 focuses on state-level decision making. It expressly addresses three key positions where leading rebels might use their remaining popularity to disrupt Republican Reconstruction: the Senate, the House of Representatives and state-selected presidential electors.Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens would have gone further and completely disenfranchised anyone who had participated in the rebellion, leader or not. Moderate Republicans, however, were more optimistic. As Senator Daniel Clark noted, once leading rebels were removed, “those who have moved in humble spheres [would] return to their loyalty and to the Government.”The strategy worked. In 1868, despite the scattered participation of former rebel soldiers as presidential electors, Southern Black voters helped elect the Republican Ulysses S. Grant over the Democrat Horatio Seymour.It is possible to read Section 3 as impliedly including the office of president as one of the “civil” offices “under the United States” covered by the general catchall provision. It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers, but the text is ambiguous enough to make this a possible reading.However, if the framers meant the catchall provision to include both presidents and postmasters, they were remarkably negligent. According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase “civil office under the United States” did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” the congressional precedent known as “Blount’s Case” established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase “civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.In addition to legal authority, there is also common sense to guide us. The text of Section 3 is structured in a manner that moves from high federal office to low state office, and the apex federal political offices are expressly named. As the former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson explained, “the specific exclusion in the case of Senators and Representatives” led him to initially presume that the framers excluded the office of president. Johnson accepted a colleague’s suggestion to the contrary, but if the text created such a presumption in the mind of a former attorney general, it is reasonable to think it may have created the same presumption in the minds of ratifiers.Actually, we have no idea whether the ratifiers shared Johnson’s initial presumption. This is because no one has discovered a single example of any ratifier discussing whether Section 3 included the office of president of the United States. Despite extraordinary efforts by researchers, no one has yet found evidence that any ratifier even considered the possibility that Section 3 abridged the people’s right to choose their president.The silence of the ratifiers on this point is important. Those favoring the disqualification of Mr. Trump insist that there is nothing “anti-democratic” about constraining the presidential choices of the national electorate. The Constitution, after all, contains a number of provisions that deny the people the right to elect whomever they wish. Article II, Section One, for example, prevents the people from electing anyone who is under age 35 or who is a foreign-born candidate.Those qualifications are expressly declared in the text and they received robust vetting and debate in the ratifying conventions. In the case of Section 3, the Supreme Court is being asked to impose new constraints on the democratic process by way of textual implication and in the absence of any public debate whatsoever.Such a reading is neither democratically appropriate nor textually necessary. And it was most certainly not “the objective sought to be achieved [or] the mischief to be avoided” by Section 3.At best, the text of Section 3 is ambiguous regarding the office of president. The Supreme Court should limit the clause to its historically verifiable meaning and scope.Let the people make their own decision about Donald Trump.Kurt Lash, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, is the author of, most recently, “The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents” and the forthcoming “A Troubled Birth of Freedom: The Struggle to Amend the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More