The Supreme Court is hearing a case over whether to let Colorado bar former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential primary… and even some liberals have defended Trump’s place on the ballot.
MSNBC legal analyst Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, went on liberal cable news network Thursday to discuss the Supreme Court hearing.
Katyal admitted that the anti-Trump case was very weak.
“I’ve watched over 400 Supreme Court arguments. I’ve done 50 myself. I would tell you this argument did not go well for the Trump challengers, and that’s to put it mildly, I probably have some other adjectives that I won’t, say on air,” Katyal said.
“We heard a lot from the court, particularly the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Alito, about how if you affirm the Colorado decision, it will empower states to mess with federal elections. And to be sure, that’s a risk.”
Katyal expressed disappointment in the anti-Trump litigants for failing to present a convincing case.
“Unfortunately, the stakes on the other side were not presented to the court today,” Katyal said.
“The thing that I was watching for was any indication anywhere about just how dangerous a ruling to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court was… You never heard the Trump challengers really get at was the risk on the other side that this is a canonical part of our Constitution, forged after the Civil War, one of the most difficult times in our nation’s history. And yet we came together and said insurrectionists can’t be on the ballot… There was no discussion of that, really.”
Katyal saw the anti-Trump litigants convince only one justice, liberal Sonya Sotomayor.
“I saw only one justice, really, Justice Sotomayor, who was really listening to what the Colorado challengers were saying,” Katyal continued.
“In a case of this gravity, you need to basically call out the other side, and you need to call out the court, even. And so you need to say about the other side, ‘You’re gutting the Constitution, Donald Trump.’ What you need to say to the court is, ‘Look, for years… you’ve staked yourself on… the original intent of the document. The original intent of the document is clear against Donald Trump.’ You need to be using your methodology that they’ve used… We heard none of that today.”
In Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the Constitution barred insurrectionists from seeking certain offices after the Civil War.
Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly.
“The whole point of the 14th Amendment is to restrict state power,” Roberts said at the hearing.
Jackson agreed. She sympathized with “the argument that really Section 3 was about preventing the South from rising again in the context of these sort of local elections, as opposed to focusing on the presidency.”
She asked the anti-Trump lawyers, “Why didn’t they [the framers of the Constitution] put the word ‘president’ in the very enumerated list in Section 3?”
The justices have yet to rule.
The Horn editorial team