On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a triumph to former President Donald Trump’s campaign by allowing it to proceed despite ongoing attempts in multiple states to exclude him from the ballot for the 2024 election.
“The Court denied a writ of certiorari petition from John Castro, a registered Republican candidate for president in 2024, who sought to have Trump removed from the ballot in Arizona,” Newsweek reported.
“Castro, John A. V. Fontes, AZ Sec. Of State, et al. The petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment is denied,” the high court said in its ruling.
Castro initiated legal actions in multiple states in an attempt to have Trump removed from the ballots due to his alleged involvement in the January 6 riots and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In December, U.S. District Judge Douglas L. Rayes dismissed Castro’s lawsuits, leading him to escalate the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge Rayes highlighted in his decision that Castro did not have the legal standing to pursue his claim, as reported by NBC News. Castro’s argument centered around Trump’s alleged backing of “insurrectionists” on January 6, 2021, as the basis for disqualifying him from the Arizona ballot.
The judge also said that his arguments “do not show that Castro is truly competing with Trump.”
In March, the much-anticipated decision of the high court was announced regarding the Colorado Supreme Court’s prohibition of Trump’s appearance on the state’s 2024 ballot. This ruling overturned the previous decision and granted permission for Trump to participate.
Previously, Elie Honig, a legal analyst at CNN, provided an overview of his predictions on how the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in the various 14th Amendment cases filed nationwide to prevent Trump from being included on the ballot. After carefully evaluating all potential inquiries and scenarios, the former federal prosecutor expressed his belief that the highest court in the nation would ultimately rule in favor of Trump.
“Nobody knows for sure how this is going to go. No practitioner, no law professor, no retired judge, no Twitter icon, no TV analyst or former prosecutor (ahem) can rightly make bold declarations about how the ongoing legal Armageddon over the 14th Amendment will ultimately come out,” Honig began in his column for the New York Intelligencer. “…[W]e can draw on adjacent examples, but we’ve never seen anything quite like the ongoing effort to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot.”
Throughout the nation, most challenges related to the 14th Amendment have not been successful. Numerous cases have been rejected by secretaries of State, state courts, or federal judges due to various reasons. Nevertheless, Colorado and Maine have recently deviated from this pattern and, albeit temporarily, determined that Trump played a role in an insurrection, preventing his inclusion on their 2024 ballots, as highlighted by Honig.
“In his petition for review, Trump makes somewhere between seven and ten arguments against his disqualification, depending how thinly we slice the pie. The Court might rule on all of them, or some, or none at all; it might find for Trump on some issues but against him on others; or it could import a rationale that Trump has not even raised. The permutations are dizzying, mathematically,” Hoenig wrote.
Above all, he pondered, the primary objective of the Supreme Court is to promptly and conclusively resolve the matter in order to prevent further legal disputes and inconsistent interpretations of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause among different states.
“The Court has every incentive to use a silver bullet here. One shot, and we’re done,” he said.
