Trump Cleared for 2024 Bid as Supreme Court Torpedoes Insurrection Clause
In a bombshell ruling timed for maximum impact, the Supreme Court has paved the way for Donald Trump’s return to the presidential battlefield – overriding lower court efforts to disqualify the Republican front-runner over his role in the January 6th Capitol riots.
Just a day before crucial Super Tuesday primaries, the nation’s highest judicial body handed Trump a massive legal victory. It rejected attempts by multiple states to invoke the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and kick the former president off the 2024 election ballots.
The Supreme Court shut down arguments that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric ahead of the Capitol breach, where he urged supporters to “fight like hell,” amounted to engaging in an insurrection – the standard for disqualification under the post-Civil War 14th Amendment provision.
In a narrowly split 5-4 decision, the conservative-leaning court ruled that regardless of whether an insurrection occurred, states cannot independently bar candidates from ballots based on this amendment without an explicit green light from Congress first.
The ruling neuters, at least for now, an audacious legal strategy seeking to leverage the insurrection clause as a Trumpian twist of poetic justice – denying the ex-president the very office he stood accused of attempting to subvert through riotous means on January 6th.
But the court’s verdict is unlikely to be the final word. Emboldened critics are already mulling whether a future Democrat-controlled Congress could conceivably invoke the clause post-election to reject certifying Trump’s victory, should he recapture the White House.
Such a doomsday scenario would thrust the nation into uncharted constitutional chaos. For Trump’s opponents, however, the court’s ruling underscores their case – that only he possesses the gall and audacity to precipitate such an unprecedented crisis.
