The last time Republican members of Congress urged Supreme Court justices to help Donald Trump in an elections case, it was December 2020. American voters had just handed the incumbent president a stinging defeat, and his allies hoped to convince justices to help overturn the results.
Roughly two-thirds of the House GOP conference signed onto a brief endorsing a radical anti-election case. The Atlantic‘s David Graham wrote at the time, “This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. … Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy.”
We now know, of course, that the effort failed; the justices rejected the case; and Trump left the White House. Three years later, however, congressional Republicans are again asking the high court to help the defeated president, though under very different legal circumstances. Politico reported:
Nearly 200 congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have joined a Supreme Court brief urging the court to side with former President Donald Trump on the question of if he is eligible to be on Colorado’s ballot in the 2024 election. The Supreme Court agreed to review a December ruling by a Colorado court that barred former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s Republican primary ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars any public official who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Because of Trump’s post-defeat efforts, and his role in attacking his own country’s democracy, the Colorado Supreme Court found him ineligible.
After the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the case, two prominent GOP lawmakers — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of…
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