US President Donald Trump confirmed on Thursday that “there are those who interfered in the elections by bringing charges” against him.
He said, “The crime rate in America has increased significantly during the administration of US President Joe Biden.”
On Thursday, the nine US Supreme Court justices are considering a case seeking to exclude Trump from the presidential elections scheduled for November in response to his behavior during his supporters’ attack on the Capitol building in 2021.
In December, the Colorado Supreme Court banned Trump from running in the state’s Republican Party primaries due to his role in the 2021 Capitol events.
Trump appealed the ruling issued in this state, and the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority that includes 3 judges appointed by the former president, is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on Thursday.
Legal experts debate the validity of such a measure and its political expediency, but they agree that the court, which made a decision in 2000 to award victory in the presidential elections to Republican George W. Bush at the expense of Democrat Al Gore, wants to avoid raising suspicions of interference in the elections.
Of the twenty states in which appeals were filed regarding Trump’s disqualification, only two of them (Colorado and Maine) have the decision been issued, while many states are awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling before deciding the cases brought before it.
In two landmark decisions taken at the end of December, the Colorado Supreme Court and then the Maine Secretary of State deemed Trump ineligible to run in the Republican primary elections.
In the two states, officials considered that the Republican billionaire could not return to the White House because he committed acts of “rebellion” during the attack on the Capitol in 2021, and therefore he was “not qualified to assume the office of president” under Article 14 of the Constitution.
This article prohibits anyone who has previously sworn allegiance to the Constitution of the United States from holding any elected office if they break their oath by participating in an insurrection.
The Supreme Court must now answer a controversial question: Does this article apply to the former president?
Trump’s lawyers considered the Colorado court’s decision flawed and called on the United States Supreme Court to overturn it “to protect the rights of tens of millions of Americans who wish to vote for President Trump.”
They devote most of the final written defenses to a seemingly minor issue, as they strive to prove that the presidency of the United States is not one of the functions covered by Article 14 of the Constitution.
The Colorado Court had considered that Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021 were covered by this article.
On that day, hundreds of Trump supporters, whose anger was fueled by the former president’s statements about electoral fraud that led to his loss, attacked the headquarters of the US Congress in an attempt to prevent the certification of the victory of his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.
Trump’s lawyers maintain that these events did not constitute an insurrection and that their client did not participate in them in any way.
The unprecedented nature of the case greatly increases the uncertainty of what the Supreme Court will conclude Thursday, but many experts believe that the justices may find an “escape” to keep Trump’s name on the ballots without risking a thorny description of his actions during the attack on the Capitol.
“In such a politically hot case, the court wants to appear as apolitical as possible,” says Stephen Schoen, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Illinois at Chicago, considering that it still “carries the stain of the 2000 election.”
During the 2000 campaign, the results between George Bush and Al Gore were very close in the decisive state of Florida. The Democrat has requested a recount of thousands of ballots that were discarded by voting machines.
But the Supreme Court halted this due to lack of time, and George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States despite not winning the popular vote at the national level.
“The court’s most likely escape would be to confirm that Congress alone has the authority to remove a candidate from the ballot for a presidential election,” Schoen argues.
This is an argument that was also used by Trump’s lawyers, but it was objected to by human rights experts who say that no intervention from Congress is necessary to implement other eligibility conditions, such as the minimum age of candidates or their place of birth.
“We fully understand that the members of the Court would prefer not to find themselves caught up in a presidential election in this way,” wrote Edward Foley, Benjamin Ginsburg, and Richard Hasen, three well-known human rights experts with different political persuasions. “But there is no escape.”
These experts called on the Supreme Court judges to rule on the merits and not on formal grounds, in order to finally resolve the issue before the November 5 elections.
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