Consider This from NPR - The Supreme Court Hands Trump A Legal And Political Win
Episode Date: March 4, 2024Former President Donald Trump scored a legal victory today. The Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that the likely Republican nominee for President should be restored to the ballot in Colorado.The decision a...lso says individual states cannot bar candidates for federal office under the insurrection clause. So: a legal victory, and also a political victory.As the clock ticks toward November 5th – Election day – it's increasingly looking like the many legal cases focused on former President Trump may tip his way, or remain unresolved.What impact will this have on Trump's campaign for a second term in the White House?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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So I reviewed very carefully the hearing proceedings and the weight of the evidence presented to me at the hearing.
And that is Maine Secretary of State Shanna Bellows speaking with my colleague Scott Detrow earlier this year. for the voters seeking to challenge Mr. Trump's qualifications was to bring that challenge to
the Secretary of State, to me, and I was required to do my job to hold a hearing to review the
evidence and issue a decision. And that begins the process in our state. Bellows was discussing
her decision to remove former President Trump from Maine's 2024 Republican primary ballot.
Maine voters had challenged his name on the ballot
based on the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War law.
It states that people who engaged in insurrection or rebellion should be disqualified from office.
And that evidence made clear, first, that those events of January 6, 2021, and we all witnessed them, they were unprecedented.
They were tragic.
But they were an attack not only upon the Capitol and government officials, but also an attack on the rule of law, on the peaceful transfer of power. The decision in Maine and also Colorado were both challenged by the Trump campaign,
challenges that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Do you think the U.S. Supreme
Court needs to take this question up? We would certainly welcome the United States Supreme Court
to make this clear. And this morning, the Supreme Court did make it clear. We come on the air with
breaking news from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has just handed down a historic ruling concerning Colorado.
Former President Donald Trump can appear on the 2024 ballot.
In a unanimous decision, the high court put Trump back on the ballot in Colorado
and ruled that individual states cannot bar candidates for federal office based on the 14th Amendment.
Now, this case over state ballots is one of many swirling around the former president.
The Supreme Court is also considering whether Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution,
which matters because he is facing a total of 91 criminal charges. They include a federal election interference case, a Georgia election
interference case, a case over his handling of classified documents, and a hush money case.
All of them, with the exception of the hush money case, have been beset by delays
and challenges pushing back the timelines of when they'll be adjudicated.
Consider this.
As the clock ticks towards November 5th, Election Day,
it is increasingly looking like the many legal cases focused on former President Trump
may tip his way or remain unresolved.
What impact will this have on Trump's campaign for a second term in the White House?
From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It is Monday, March 4th.
It's Consider This from NPR. Former President Donald Trump scored a legal victory today.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the likely Republican nominee for president should be restored to the ballot in Colorado.
And the decision says individual states cannot bar candidates for federal office under the insurrection clause.
So, a legal victory, also a political victory. And who better to walk through the state of Trump's legal and political challenges than NPR senior political
editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. I talked to him about today's decision and the
implications going forward. Bottom line is it means he's going to be on the ballot, you know,
first for Super Tuesday tomorrow, which might be the biggest implication because he can acquire delegates from those states.
In the general election, it's a little bit less so, you know, just from a number standpoint,
because the places where they were considering kicking him off were mostly blue states. Colorado,
you know, used to be a swing state, but has trended much more left in the past two decades.
At most, it likely could mean missing out on one delegate
in a congressional district in Maine, someplace he won in 2016. And of course, every electoral vote
matters when elections are this close. But more broadly, this is a big win for Trump because it's
further proof that any remedy for those who want to keep Trump out of the White House is clear that
it's not going to go through the courts, but it's going to have to rest in the hands of voters.
Okay, well, I'm going to step back and just tick through these cases. With the
exception of the Hush Money case, the Stormy Daniels case, all of the prosecutors who have
taken on Trump in court seem to be running into delays, into challenges. Start with the Georgia
case. This is the election interference case. It has had issues that boil down to allegations of
misconduct against the lead prosecutor. Yeah, and there's a pending decision in that case about whether DA Fannie
Willis can continue on in the case. And that's really crucial here, because if she's kicked off,
it's really unlikely that this case is going to go to trial before Election Day, if it takes place
at all. And this was one of the strongest cases against Trump, because he had been caught on tape
saying that he wanted elections officials there to find votes for him. But if Fannie Willis is not kicked off, what I think
all the attention that her ethics hearing received and teaches us, you know, was playing out on cable
TV for hours because cameras are allowed in the courtroom. What it teaches us is that a Trump
trial in Georgia would play out like kind of like an OJ Simpson style trial during the heart of a
general election. Again, if the timing works out. Now, I don't think that Willis will be cowed also,
by the way, by questions of whether it's appropriate to hold a trial that close to
an election considering how the Trump team has gone after her. But this is a sprawling case,
and the timing could be tight to see if it happens before the general election at all.
Let's scoot south to Florida, where we have the classified documents case.
And where I gather even prosecutors are now hoping to push things back.
They're asking for a delay to July.
Why?
Yeah, I think they would have rather kept it earlier.
But there's just been reams and reams of motions filed by Trump's defense team that have really
gummed up the system.
They've ranged from wanting more of the classified material to outright wanting the case dismissed.
Trump's team has succeeded in delaying this case and others, which is a huge part of the strategy from Trump's team, because they want all of this pundit until after the election.
The prosecution now proposes July 8th.
Trump's team wants it pushed back even further than that until after the election, but said that if the judge in this case, a Trump appointed judge, Eileen Cannon,
doesn't want to do that, they proposed August 12th. So we could see a trial in this case before the election. But Cannon has been far more friendly toward Trump's team than any of the
other judges in any of the other cases. And they're all having to coordinate each other's
calendars. So when one of these cases gets pushed off, there's a domino effect.
Okay, which brings us to the January 6th case, the federal January 6th case.
Where does that stand?
Yeah, and this one's tied up in the Supreme Court, and the speed with which the Supreme
Court chooses to act is really going to determine whether this case gets heard at all before
the election.
And right now, the court does not really want to appear to be moving all that quickly on
this.
That's a separate issue from the ruling we got today, but also before the Supreme Court, and it is to do with immunity. Remind us.
Right. And the court did move pretty quickly on this 14th Amendment case, but the immunity case,
really not that much. The Supreme Court decided to take up the question of whether a former
president can be tried for actions taken while president. The lower court, with Democratic and
Republican appointed judges
unanimously and forcefully rejected the idea that essentially a president is above the law.
Because of that, a lot of people really thought that the Supreme Court wasn't going to take up
this question, but it surprised some people and did. And it didn't schedule oral arguments in
this case until the week of April 22nd. That really enraged a lot of people who want to see
a trial before the election in this really fundamental case. Now, whether that happens at all really
is in the court's hands. The court could move quickly here like it did in U.S. v. Nixon.
Back then, it issued its decision in just three weeks. If it were to do that in this case,
there could be a verdict with days to spare until election day. But if the court
issues its decision in June at the very end of this term, which is what it essentially does or
usually does with these kinds of big cases, any verdict would come after the election because of
the original timeline that was set up by the federal judge in this case. I mean, do we know
why this immunity issue seems so central? Why are they not taking it up until April 22nd, late April?
The Supreme Court is traditionally very mercurial, and we haven't heard anything from the justices
on why they're doing this in this order versus, for example, what they did so quickly with the
14th Amendment case. I can only presume that because Colorado votes in the primary on Super
Tuesday, March 5th, that they felt like they had to get this done
much more quickly than that, which, you know, the Supreme Court knows that the election isn't until
November. But the Trump team in filing these kinds of delays, if the Supreme Court does,
you know, issue its decision very quickly in three weeks or so, and you wind up with this trial right
in the middle of the general election, that really could mean that the Trump team kind of shot itself in the foot because they really don't want a trial like this right in the heart of a general election because general election voters view his conduct very differently.
Domenico, so many moving parts here.
But let me try to land us on something resembling the big picture because I just keep thinking when this whole election cycle started, it seemed entirely possible we might be watching
Trump running his campaign from a courtroom or running it from behind bars. Is that now looking
less likely than it was a few months ago? Well, it's certainly looking a lot less likely than it
did several months ago. These indictments were brought last year. What Trump's team has tried
to do repeatedly is dismiss, delay, distract, and they've gotten very good at being able to delay these cases, push them off and push them off and hoping to push them over the election cliff really after the election on November 5th, try to get it beyond that date.
But there's the other possibility that they are going to run this roulette wheel and wind up having one or three of these cases, major cases, right in the middle, in the
heart of a general election. And if that were to happen, we know that a general election audience
views Trump's conduct very differently than Republican voters who were giving him so much
money in the primary and really helping him to the nomination if he gets there.
That was NPR's Domenico Montanaro. This episode was produced by Jordan Marie Smith and Brianna Scott.
It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Dana Farrington.
Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.
It's Consider This from NPR.
I'm Mary Louise Kelly.