Following Colorado’s first-of-its-kind ruling to ban former President Donald Trump’s name from the state’s primary ballot based on his actions leading to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump and his lawyers are urging the Supreme Court to reverse the state’s ruling. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Colorado’s case that Trump is disqualified from running again based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause after Trump appealed.
With more states looking into similar matters, Trump’s legal team submitted a filing on Thursday, Jan. 18, to the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments from both sides on Feb. 8. The former president’s legal team called on the Supreme Court to make a “swift and decisive end” to these disputes.
In the filing, Trump’s attorney’s wrote that efforts to bar the GOP frontrunner from ballots “threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots.”
Now, American voters eagerly await a decision by SCOTUS. The 1872 14th amendment clause, which Colorado’s high court used to bar Trump from the ballot, is a Civil War provision that states that anyone who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it is no longer eligible to hold state or federal public office.
Trump’s attorneys contend that he did not engage in anything that qualifies as insurrection.