Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Unlikely to Uphold Colorado Ruling Disqualifying Trump

The justices will find the least-embarrassing way of making this case go away and putting the former president back on the state’s primary ballot.

December 20, 2023 at 3:06 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Facing new legal headwinds
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

In a remarkable plot twist, the Colorado Supreme Court has found that former President Donald Trump must be excluded from the state’s primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Now the pressure is on the US Supreme Court to decide whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, on which the Colorado court relied, truly does block Trump from the ballot.

This would be a historic case, to say the least. If the justices rule directly on whether Trump is disqualified under the Constitution, their ruling would apply in every state, not only Colorado.