By Ahmad Dagher
WASHINGTON, D.C.––Under the cover of a unanimous victory for Trump on March 4 emerged a 5-4 division between the Justices on a further ruling made in the case.
The three liberal judges of the Supreme Court––Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson––were joined by Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett in arguing that the rest of the court had gone too far in their ruling.
By regulating that the 14th Amendment could only be enforced through a statute in Congress, the other Justices had “decided momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily,” wrote Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson in their concurring opinion.
All 9 Justices, however, had reached the same decision on the main question of the day––whether the Colorado state court’s decision to take Trump off of the presidential ballot was valid. The court ultimately concluded that “…States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency…”, allowing President Trump to remain on the ballot.
But the liberal Justices argued that that idea was “…enough to resolve this case. Yet the majority goes further.” They wrote, “although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”
They went further, referencing Justice Roberts’s dissent in the previous, extremely controversial overturning of Roe v. Wade: “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.”
Justice Barrett agreed, noting that the decision had unnecessarily dealt with “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.”
But she also noted that the liberal Justices may have gone too far. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”
Attempting to focus on the unity of the court, she wrote, “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
