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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, left, speaks as Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens during a panel discussion at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The Supreme Court may have unanimously ruled in favor of Donald Trump Monday, but the Court’s liberal wing refused to align itself with the remainder of the justices — no matter how much one Trump appointee insisted that everyone was getting along.
The Court issued a per curiam decision ruling that Colorado is not authorized to disqualify Trump from running for president in the state. In the unsigned 12-page ruling, it said that “all nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”
Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett penned a two-paragraph concurrence to the ruling in favor of the former president. In it, Barrett said she agreed that states have no power to enforce Section 3 against presidential candidates, but said that the Court should have stopped there.
Colorado’s case did not require the justices to answer “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced,” said Barrett, chastising the majority for going beyond what was needed to resolve the dispute before it. Despite her disagreement with the Court’s handling of the case, Barrett had a relatively sunny take on the takeaway.
“The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” Barrett wrote in an apparent effort to hold up her fellow justices as models of patriotic unity. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”
Barrett continued, framing the case’s outcome in a message of harmony for all.
“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity,” she said. “All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
It seems, though, that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson were decidedly unwilling to allow Barrett to dictate messaging that reflected on them. Over six pages, Sotomayor railed against the majority for the same reason Barrett concurred — essentially overdoing its job and handing Trump a larger win than was necessary in the case.
Sotomayor began by quoting the Court’s highly controversial 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which gutted the right to an abortion.
“If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” she quoted, then reminded that the principle of judicial restraint goes back to Marbury v. Madison.
Sotomayor slammed the majority for deciding not just the case before it, but hypothetical future challenges — and minced no words as she did so.
“In this case, the Court must decide whether Colorado may keep a Presidential candidate off the ballot on the ground that he is an oathbreaking insurrectionist and thus disqualified from holding federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” she summarized and said that all the Court needed to do was answer that one question.
Sotomayor then took issue with the characterization of the unanimous ruling both Barrett and the majority used in their opinions.
“Even though “[a]ll nine Members of the Court” agree that this independent and sufficient rationale resolves this case, five Justices go on,” Sotomayor wrote, distancing the Court’s liberal flank from much of the majority’s decision.
Sotomayor said that the justices not only decided unnecessary “novel constitutional questions,” but also that they did so to “insulate” themselves and Trump “from future controversy.” She specifically referenced the majority’s ruling about who can enforce Section 3 and by what mechanism, and said that it “announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Sotomayor also slammed the majority for ruling that Congress would need to enforce Section 3 by enacting legislation that specifically names individuals who are disqualified for running for president. As Sotomayor detailed the list of things the majority should not have opined upon, she referred each time to the unnamed subject of disqualification — in this case, Trump — as “an oathbreaking insurrectionist.”
The concurrence provided a reminder about the origin of the 14th Amendment.
“The Reconstruction Amendments ‘were specifically designed as an expansion of federal power and an intrusion on state sovereignty,”” it said. Given the context, it said, it would “defy logic” to interpret it as giving states more — and the federal government less — power.
Furthermore, Sotomayor said, every other part of the 14th Amendment is self-executing and does not require any act of Congress. Insisting that Congressional action would be necessary to keep Trump off Colorado’s ballot is inconsistent and unsupported by the rest of the Amendment, she wrote.
Ultimately, Sotomayor says that the majority opinion oversteps its mandate.
“What it does today, the Court should have left undone,” the final section of the opinion begins, quoting directly from Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore, which ultimately led to Bush taking office. “The Court today needed to resolve only a single question: whether an individual State may keep a Presidential candidate found to have engaged in insurrection off its ballot. The majority resolves much more than the case before us … In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.”
Sotomayor ended with a statement about the significance of Section 3 within the particular context of the post-Civil War Amendments and characterized their concurrence not as a nuanced difference of approach, but as a “protest.”
Section 3 serves an important, though rarely needed, role in our democracy. The American people have the power to vote for and elect candidates for national office, and that is a great and glorious thing. The men who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, however, had witnessed an “insurrection [and] rebellion” to defend slavery. They wanted to ensure that those who had participated in that insurrection, and in possible future insurrections, could not return to prominent roles. Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President. Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.
Read the ruling here.
