The Supreme Court seems poised to reject efforts to kick Trump off the ballot over the Capitol riot

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court seems poised to reject attempts to kick former President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot, with conservative and liberal justices in apparent agreement in a case that puts them at the heart of a presidential election.

A definitive ruling for Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, would largely end efforts in Colorado, Maine and elsewhere to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot.

The justices could act quickly, possibly by Super Tuesday on March 5, when Colorado, Maine and 13 other states will hold primaries.

Conservative and liberal justices alike questioned during arguments Thursday whether Trump can be disqualified from being president again because of his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, ending with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Their main concern was whether Congress must act before states can invoke a constitutional provision that was adopted after the Civil War to prevent former officeholders who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again. There also were questions about whether the president is covered by the provision.

In the first ruling of its kind, Colorado’s Supreme Court decided that the provision, Section 3 of the 14th amendment, could be applied to Trump, who the court found incited the Capitol attack.

But on a Supreme Court that prefers to avoid cases in which it is the final arbiter of a political dispute, the justices appeared to be searching for a consensus ruling and the issue of congressional action seemed to draw the most support.

Justice Elena Kagan was among several justices who wanted to know “why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”

Eight of the nine justices suggested that they were open to at least some of the arguments made by Jonathan Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer at the Supreme Court. Trump could win his case if the court finds just one of those arguments persuasive.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded most skeptical of Mitchell’s arguments, though she too might not vote to uphold the Colorado ruling that found that Trump “engaged in insurrection” and is ineligible to be president.

In another sign of trouble for the Colorado voters who sued to remove Trump from the ballot, the justices spent little time talking about whether Trump actually “engaged in insurrection” following the 2020 election.

Lawyer Jason Murray, representing the voters, pressed the point that Trump incited the Capitol attack to prevent the peaceful handover of power “for the first time in history.”

Mitchell argued that the Capitol riot was not an insurrection and, even if it was, Trump did not directly participate.

Trump, speaking to reporters after the proceedings, called the Supreme Court argument “a beautiful thing to watch in many respects,” even as he complained about the case being brought in the first place.

“I hope that democracy in this country will continue,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.