Wins for the GOP presidential candidates

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the fifth of March, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: the road to Super Tuesday.

Voters in fifteen states go to the polls today. They’ll get to cast ballots for their preferred candidates. And as you heard a moment ago, that includes voters in states like Colorado, Illinois, and Maine where state officials tried to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

REICHARD: All nine justices agreed that Trump cannot be removed from the 2024 ballots. That would take an act of Congress.

You could hear the eventual ruling in this comment during oral argument last month by Justice Elena Kagan to one of the lawyers arguing to keep Trump off the ballot:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Most baldly, I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.

EICHER: Joining us now to talk about the Supreme Court’s decision is Daniel Suhr. He is an attorney well versed in constitutional law. He’s also a contributor to World Opinions.

REICHARD: Daniel, good morning.

DANIEL SUHR: Good morning, Mary. Great to be with you.

REICHARD: Well, Daniel, it’s unanimous in judgment that Colorado can’t kick Trump off the ballot. And why not? What’s the basic principle?

SUHR: Sure, Mary. So the Supreme Court was looking at Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It’s one of the post Civil War amendments, and the rule that the framers of the amendment laid down was pretty simple: if you engage in insurrection against the United States, in violation of an oath that you had taken previously, you can’t serve in government office. Right, and that makes sense. If we had a bunch of Confederates being elected to federal office after the Civil War, Reconstruction wouldn’t have worked out like the framers of the 14th Amendment wanted. So that provision was exhumed from the dustbin of history just in the last year on the allegation that President Trump’s behavior on January 6 2020 was somehow engaging in an insurrection, and therefore Section 3 would apply. And what the Supreme Court said is, if you read Section 3, that that’s not something that’s up to individual states, it’s only the federal government that can decide who is eligible for federal office. We don’t want a patchwork of different state governments making individual rulings about who can or can’t serve as our president.

REICHARD: And to be clear, this opinion says nothing about insurrection or January 6th happenings, correct?

SUHR: That’s right, Mary. There’s no factual conclusion, there was no jury trial here. All that we have is really a legal conclusion that the 14th Amendment, especially Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, only applies to federal offices, and can only be enforced by federal officials.

REICHARD: Now, all nine agreed on the result, but they didn’t all agree on the reasons why. Let’s start with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote her own concurrence. What did she say? And why does it matter at the end of the day?

SUHR: Her concurrence is very short. It’s only a page. And she basically said that the majority of the court decided more than they needed to in this case. What the majority of the Court said in its opinion, was that only Congress can exercise the power to disqualify someone from federal office through a law that Congress would enact, that would implement Section 3 of the 14th amendment. And what Justice Barrett said is that that was more than the Court needed to decide. But she only said it for a paragraph. Her second paragraph was emphasizing that that disagreement is secondary to what the court does agree on, that the entire court agrees that Donald Trump is appropriately placed on the Colorado ballot, and that that’s not something that the Colorado Supreme Court can decide for itself.

REICHARD: And what was the main message of the three liberal justices then?

SUHR: Yeah, I think the three liberal justices were frustrated that the court really shut the door, not just on this action, but any future action, trying to disqualify President Trump. There was at least some suggestion that if state courts could not remove President Trump from the ballot, that perhaps federal courts could remove President Trump from the ballot, and the way the majority opinion is written, it really forecloses that possibility. It really says that this is a problem for Congress; that Congress, when it drafted the 14th amendment 150 years ago, intended for Congress to be the ones that adopted an implementing law, and therefore, some future federal court judge could not do what the Colorado Supreme Court had done here.

REICHARD: What does this ruling tell you about the priorities of the Supreme Court this election year?

SUHR: Yeah, the court clearly wants to maintain its appropriate role, which is deciding only the cases and controversies before it. The court doesn’t want to be partisan or perceived as partisan. Right, I love the line, “Judges don’t wear red jerseys or blue jerseys, they wear black robes,” that once they take the bench, their job is to be nonpartisan, right? To be blind in the sense that like the statue of Lady Justice is blindfolded. And yet partisan and political and election related questions come to them all the time. And their job is to decide them as best they can, based only on the law, not on their personal political preferences. And it seems like in this case, the entire court was unified in that goal and even if they didn’t get there perfectly in one another’s opinions, that they wanted the American people to hear that they are administering the law fairly and without regard to the political or partisan consequences of their decisions.

REICHARD: Okay well let’s move on now. On Sunday, Nikki Haley won her first primary contest…the District of Columbia, where the GOP reported that just over two thousand people cast ballots. The Trump campaign congratulated Haley for being crowned “queen of the swamp.”

After the South Carolina primary, Haley said her 40% share of the vote isn’t some small number…that there is a segment of the GOP that doesn’t want Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. But do you see that translating into any wins for Haley tonight?

SUHR: No, what happened in Washington DC, I think will be her one and only win. There’s, I suppose, some people who think that maybe some other state, maybe Utah, would also come through for her. But at the end of the day, all of this commentary on the horse race assumes there’s a race in the first place. And there ain’t. This has been over for a long time. Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee once again. And really all we can take from the results in Washington DC, are to show the disconnect between where the Republican base is at, and where many of the party’s leaders and professionals are at. That the people who live and work in Washington DC are lobbyists, are consultants, are congressional staffers, are think tank people, and they are just in a fundamentally different place on politics and the future of the party than most of the base because most of the base is enthusiastically ready for Trump 2.0 And that wasn’t what they wanted. They didn’t want Trump 1.0, they’re not excited about Trump 2.0. They’re gonna get it either way.

REICHARD: So do you think Haley will drop out of the race if Trump wins big tonight?

SUHR: Yeah, look, part of the reality of politics is that it runs on money. At the end of the day, you’ve got to put gas in the campaign bus. And if a candidate doesn’t have a compelling rationale to continue in a race, the donor dollars dry up really quick. There’s the extent to which this election is a little unique on that rule, because many donors are supporting Haley not because they expect her to win, but because they want to make a statement. They’re intentionally distancing themselves from President Trump, so that they can say, like, “He’s not my guy. Look, I supported Nikki Haley, even knowing that she wouldn’t win.” So there’s some of that sentiment. But even that as a source of funds is not a long term sustainable strategy. And so the longer she stays in the race, the less of a rationale there will be for her, the less support there will be for her. And I think sooner rather than later, this thing will draw to a close.

REICHARD: Daniel Suhr is an attorney in Wisconsin and writes for WORLD Opinions. Daniel, thanks for joining us!

SUHR: Thank you, Mary.

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