WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump appealed to the Supreme Court Thursday and urged the justices to quickly reverse a Colorado state court decision that would keep him off the ballot there on the grounds that he engaged in insurrection against the United States.
Trump, who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, argued that the voters, not state judges, should decide who is elected to the nation’s highest office. His lawyers wrote that the Colorado decision “would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide.”
While they did not propose a timetable, they said it was crucial that the court take up the issue urgently.
Trump’s team offered several reasons for overturning the Colorado court. One would be to rule that the president was not covered by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, an argument that was adopted by a Colorado trial judge.
“Nothing that President Trump did ‘engaged’ in insurrection,” they added. “President Trump never told his supporters to enter the Capitol, either in his speech at the Ellipse or in any of his statements or communications before or during the events at the Capitol.”
The Colorado Supreme Court became the first in the nation to hold that Trump is disqualified from holding office again. By a 4-3 vote, the state judges said Trump “engaged in insurrection” in a failed bid to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.
But the state judges agreed to put their ruling on hold while Trump appealed to the high court. As a result, his name will appear on the state’s Republican primary ballots.