With democracy on the ballot in 2024, it’s hard not to view even judicial news through a political lens. But beware of pundits and scholars who insist that the judiciary must take politics into account when making decisions. The Supreme Court risks sliding down just such a slippery slope when it reviews Donald Trump’s Colorado ballot disqualification in what is sure to be a momentous case next month.
That case, and the similar Dec. 30 ruling by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, exemplify precisely why we have a Supreme Court: to deliver the last word on how to interpret the Constitution and apply it. The rule of law is threatened if the court treats constitutional provisions as more a matter of the nation’s politics than of law.
That case, and the similar Dec. 30 ruling by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, exemplify precisely why we have a Supreme Court.
In a New York Times op-ed last month, Yale law professor Samuel Moyn argued, in part, that Supreme Court justices should carefully consider the political risks of ruling against Trump. “It is not obvious how many would accept a Supreme Court decision that erased Mr. Trump’s name from every ballot in the land,” Moyn writes. “And rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.”
And it’s true that judges neither can nor should erase the political state of the union from their minds. The danger resides in replacing precedent and sound legal analysis with political concern as the dispositive factor in deciding.
Little could be more inimical to the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law. As political philosopher John Locke wrote in 1689, “Where law ends, tyranny begins.”
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states:
No person shall… hold any office… under the United States… who, having previously taken an oath, as… an officer of the United States.. to…
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