Last week’s oral argument in the Supreme Court in Anderson v. Colorado made clear that the Court will likely reverse Colorado’s decision to disqualify former president Donald Trump from the presidential ballot on the basis of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It may be that in disputes of this importance, lawyers can do little to sway the high court, but the lawyers defending the Colorado supreme court did themselves no favors by evading hypotheticals, ignoring the implications of their argument for other states and future elections, and even disregarding the justices’ admonishments to stop avoiding their questions.
The disastrous — at least from Colorado’s perspective — oral arguments raise the strong possibility that the Court’s ruling may be lopsidedly in Trump’s favor or even unanimous. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose questioning was often hostile to Trump’s position, held the door open to an opinion that would hold that states cannot disqualify Trump from being a presidential candidate.
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