Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump another gift this week, keeping him on the ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists. Monday’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson followed last week’s decision to take up his immunity appeal in the federal election interference case, which has put the prospect of completing a trial before the November presidential election in doubt.
The justices were unanimous on the bottom line that Colorado and other states couldn’t bar Trump from appearing on the ballot. But there was serious disagreement lurking in the decision. The three Democratic appointees wrote separately to chide the majority for foreclosing further avenues of keeping an “oathbreaking insurrectionist,” as they put it, from the White House. That prompted a weird separate opinion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who agreed that her Republican-appointed colleagues went too far but nonetheless whined that “writings on the court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” She didn’t cite any authority for that proposition, probably because it’s not the court’s job to temper public discourse.
Barrett was then absent from President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night. She was probably glad she missed it, because Biden called out the justices in attendance who overturned Roe v. Wade to their faces. Three justices from the Dobbs majority — Barrett, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — weren’t there, so Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch endured the rebuke on behalf of the GOP-appointed jurists who eliminated federal abortion rights. Of course, that pales in comparison to what women across the country have endured in the wake of the 2022 ruling.
Once again, the justices don’t seem to be rushing to decide this one, which happens to coincide with Trump’s strategy of delaying the case as long as possible.
The federal election interference trial was supposed…
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