Supreme Court ruling on Donald Trump’s presidential run could affect California. Here’s how

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday on whether Donald Trump is disqualified from another term as president over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and depending on the outcome, California could be able to remove the former president from the general election ballot.

Still, justices on Thursday seemed unlikely to affirm a Colorado Supreme Court decision that moved to bar Trump from the state’s ballot. Rather justices from across the political spectrum questioned whether a single state should be able to disqualify a national candidate, and what the political and legal ramifications of allowing that might be.

>> Read the latest about Thursday’s arguments before the justices <<

California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis had hoped to accomplish that for the March 5 primary. California ballots have already started being mailed with Trump’s name on them.

In Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court will decide if Colorado was correct in ruling to exclude Trump from the ballot under the argument that he engaged in insurrection and thus is banned from being president again by an 1868 constitutional amendment.

Both Colorado and Maine decided to pull Trump’s name from the ballot, though their actions are on hold pending the Supreme Court’s ruling.

A decision to disqualify the candidacy of Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has broader legal and political implications.

The case puts the nation’s highest bench in the middle of a presidential election for the first time since 2000 at a moment when the public largely views the Supreme Court as partisan.

A decision could affect not only the presidential race, but also candidates for positions lower on ballots nationwide. And this is the first time the Supreme Court will rule on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted after the Civil War to bar former Confederates from holding public office.

Today the conservative-leaning court is ideologically split 6-3. Trump appointed three of the sitting justices.

There are myriad ways the Supreme Court could rule, narrowly or broadly, about his ballot status.

What is the Colorado case?

The initial case to pull Trump from Colorado’s ballot came from four Republican and two independent voters working with watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Their lawsuit claimed Trump provoked the Jan. 6, 2021, attack to subvert the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election and that this amounts to insurrection, an act of uprising against the government. Under Section 3, they say, this makes him ineligible to be president again and thus should not be on the primary ballot.

Section 3 reads:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

In December, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed in a 4-3 decision Trump engaged in insurrection and could not appear on the state’s ballot.

Trump’s lawyers claim that he did not instigate an insurrection. They say that Section 3 does not apply to the president, a position not directly stated in the clause. His lawyers claim that he did not take an oath to “support” the Constitution, rather “preserve, protect and defend” it.

Since he’d never been elected before becoming president, Trump attorneys said, he didn’t take any other oath to “support” it.

CREW, the six voters and some legal scholars say that Section 3 should certainly apply to the nation’s highest office, while others note its omission could be interpreted as intentional.

And the Supreme Court could decide that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were political speech and protected by the First Amendment, something the Colorado court had rejected.

“In theory, they could say that Section 3 keeps him from being president, but not from being on the ballot,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. “But that would not make sense from a practical perspective.”

Chemerinsky was one of many legal scholars who helped submit briefs to the Supreme Court urging justices to rule against Trump, arguing the Constitution under Section 3 says he should be disqualified.

“If they are going to rule for Trump,” he said, “they might say that there needs to be a federal statute before Section 3 can be implemented.”

What happened in California?

Lawsuits in dozens of states including California challenged Trump’s ballot ability, but Colorado and Maine were the only two states that moved to bar him. Both are on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision.

There isn’t a deadline for the Supreme Court to release its decision, though legal professionals have urged the court to act swiftly as Colorado and Maine’s primaries, like California’s, are March 5.

After the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, California’s lieutenant governor asked the secretary of state to “explore every legal option” to take Trump off the ballot. Secretary of State Shirley Weber kept him on the Republican primary ballot when she released the certified list of candidates.

Weber responded to Kounalakis in a Dec. 22 letter saying that challenges to ballot eligibility are to be resolved by courts and that her office was continuing to track legal actions, including that of the Supreme Court. Weber told the Los Angeles Times that blocking Trump from the ballot could be seen as political.

There are pending court cases in California over his ballot status.

Trump would likely not win the general election vote in California given its overwhelming Democratic voter registration. But in states with high Republican concentrations, removing Trump from the ballot would significantly hinder is election odds.

The last time the Supreme Court was thrust into a presidential election was in 2000 — Bush v. Gore — when the justices effectively ruled former President George W. Bush won and stopped a Florida recount. The decision then too was criticized as polarized, sparking similar public debate about the Supreme Court’s role and fair elections.