The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump To Appear On All Primary Ballots

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Colorado could not disqualify former President Donald Trump from its ballot. The opinion came the day before Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states will vote in the presidential primary. This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Our producers are Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Andrea in California. It's my birthday, so I'm checking off something from my bucket list, and that is I am currently at training to be a pole worker for the very first time in my life. I'll be working the poles for Super Tuesday. This podcast was recorded at 12.11 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, March 4th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. Thanks for doing your part for democracy and happy birthday. And I hope you're eating a lot today to get ready for a long day tomorrow at the polls. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Donald Trump will stay on the ballot. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Colorado must restore the former president to its primary ballot. That decision comes the day before that state and many others hold primaries for Super Tuesday. So, Carrie, take us back to the beginning of this case, if you would. Colorado took Trump off the ballot for his actions related to the January 6th insurrection. What was the argument? Yeah, Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump should be removed from the Republican primary ballot in that state because of part of the 14th Amendment that was passed after the Civil War,

designed to keep insurrectionists, to keep Confederates from holding public office. And Section 3 of that amendment says, if you have taken an oath to support the Constitution, and then you engage in an insurrection, you should not be able to hold office moving forward. And the argument from these six Colorado voters, including some Republicans, was that January 6th amounted to an insurrection and that Donald Trump's role during that Capitol riot should have disqualified him. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed, kind of putting this issue on the front burner and really on a fast track to the Supreme Court, which decided today just about a month

after it heard arguments. And the court said no to that, essentially. Why? What did the justices say, Carrie? This was a really interesting opinion. It was unanimous in the conclusion, which is that a single state does not have the power to kick off a federal candidate on this basis using the 14th Amendment. And so they talked a lot about in this decision and at oral argument about the chaos, the patchwork, the messy situations that could ensue if different states took different actions. You know, say Colorado thought January 6th was an insurrection and Donald Trump engaged in one. But what if another state came to a different conclusion or they use different standards? Or as some Republicans said, they might consider bouncing Joe Biden off the

ballot for allegedly engaging in some other kind of insurrection, maybe at the border, maybe elsewhere. And the unanimous ruling today from the Supreme Court was that that just could not stand. That's too much power for a single state in federal elections. I want to talk more about that unanimity in a second. But first, Domenico, you know, this is a big win, of course, for former President Trump. And as Kerry mentioned, multiple states around the country were waiting for the Supreme Court decision before deciding whether they should remove him from their ballots. What is the impact of this decision on those other states? Well, I mean, it's likely that it's going to mean that

he's going to be on the ballot everywhere. You know, this was always sort of a hook that liberals really shouldn't have hung their hat on, probably considering that this was always unlikely of a case to really kick Trump off, because the court's always going to be a little wary of taking off of the ballot, somebody who a lot of people could be voting for, especially a former president. There are arguments, obviously, in favor of what was being argued, but the court in this case essentially punted and said that it didn't want to really touch this and said it was, as Kerry said, too much power for a single state to have. But what it means politically is that Trump is going to be on the ballot.

Do we have a sense of how many other states might have been in this sort of in this bucket of thinking about not letting Trump be on the ballot? Had this decision gone a different way? Yeah, well, Maine, Colorado and Illinois all had ruled in their states to bar Trump from the ballot, but essentially had put on hold those decisions until they saw what the Supreme Court decided. And now it has. There were more than half a dozen other states that were also considering this.

So, Carrie, this decision was not exactly unexpected given the tenor of the oral arguments in this case. The justices seemed to be sort of hinting that they were not in favor of this argument Colorado was making. But what does the unanimous decision signal? Is that a surprise? I don't think it is a surprise. I mean, the questions were coming fast and furious from the justices at this oral argument last month. We had Brett Kavanaugh raising the essential question of democracy and disenfranchising tens of millions of voters who wanted to cast their ballots for Donald Trump. What about the idea that we should think about democracy, think about the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice, letting the people decide, because your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree. And then we had people like Justice Elena Kagan

interrogating her former law clerk, Jason Murray, who was arguing for these Colorado voters. I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States. And so after hearing things like that across the spectrum of the bench, I don't think it is surprising that this was a unanimous ruling or that it came quickly or that it came a day before the Super Tuesday primaries. I mean, Carrie, it was a unanimous decision, as we've said, but it wasn't as if the justices are in agreement about the why, right?

Well, you know, one thing that was so interesting about this, this was only 20 pages start to finish, was that the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Katonji Brown-Jackson, filed a concurrence, basically accusing the conservative majority here of going too far, of overreaching. And what they said is it seems like from reading the majority opinion that conservative majority here would require Congress to pass a very specific law in order to disqualify this candidate, Donald Trump, from the ballot. And it's not clear at all that's going

to happen or there's enough time for that to happen before the November election. And they raised questions about why that was necessary to do and whether the court should have just ruled very narrowly. In fact, in kind of a pointed statement, these liberal justices quoted John Roberts himself in the landmark ruling that overruled Roe v. Wade a few years ago, saying if it's not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more. Yeah. And then in this case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote separately, right? What did she say? She basically said, all you need to decide here is that states lack the power to enforce this part of the 14th Amendment against presidential candidates. That's all you needed to do. And you didn't need to go any farther. And she also seemed to be somewhat critical of the liberal justices and some of their rhetoric. She basically said the courts has settled a

politically charged issue in the volatile season of a presidential election. And in this circumstances, writings on the court should turn the national temperature down, not up. It's kind of odd, right, to hear or read a justice writing this, because while we all can sort of posit whether or not they think about politics, this is pretty clearly showing that that was pretty front and center, at least in Justice Coney Barrett's thinking, right? Well, it's impossible not to recognize that this is the most important decision in the middle of a presidential election year since Bush v. Gore, you know, in 2000, when the justices basically stopped the recount in Florida and handed the

election to George W. Bush. And it seems pretty clear that the legal challenges occurring in other states over Section 3 of the 14th Amendment will now go in Donald Trump's favor because of this court decision. And it's a little less clear, but it may also be the case that the court majority has foreclosed the possibility that in January, Congress could refuse to count the electoral votes for Donald Trump in the event that he is the victor under this provision of the 14th Amendment too. It does sort of raise a question, if they are thinking about politics separately, why they took up the immunity case to go April 22nd, which is a couple months from now, and pushes potentially a trial off till the very heart of the general election, if not beyond it. Let's take a quick break. More in just a minute. And we're back. Carrie, the court also recently said that it would hear arguments in a separate case surrounding Trump's claim that he should have immunity from prosecution for actions he took while president. We mentioned

this case a moment ago, and that includes his actions on January 6th. Does this decision today give us any insight into the court's thinking in the immunity case? I don't think so. You know, there's very little. There's very little in the argument out last month and very little in this opinion today itself on the facts of January 6th. You know, what it was, what it wasn't, Donald Trump's role in it. And that will be more in play the week of April 22nd when the justices take up this issue of presidential immunity for Trump, because a central question there is whether Donald Trump was acting on and before January 6th, 2021, as a candidate or as the president of the United States. And some courts have ruled he was acting more as a candidate, and that he was breaking the law, potentially breaking the law there. And so some of these questions aren't going to really come to the surface in several weeks' time when the court deals with that immunity issue, I think. They were not present today in this ruling.

Those arguments aren't happening until April, though. How might they overlay with or intersect with the presidential campaign as it continues? Yeah, Sarah, this is going to be a real mess. It's an open question as to what the justices might do in that immunity case and how much time they will leave for a potential trial to occur in Washington, D.C. to verdict before an election. It's theoretically possible that the trial could begin before the November election. I'm not clear that Judge Tanya Chutkin here in D.C. will schedule it that close to the election or what might happen if there's no verdict before then. Domenico, I want to ask you something that people ask me as a campaign reporter, you know, especially when I'm out in crowds like crowds of Nikki Haley

supporters who maybe don't want Trump or Biden to be their president. And I hear sometimes this idea that, well, something could still happen to Trump. He's got all these legal troubles. We saw today that one of those legal troubles seems to be put aside for the moment. Is there anything at this point that could reasonably, realistically prevent Donald Trump from being the Republican nominee? No. I mean, aside from people voting against him on Super Tuesday, which is the main primary day, the biggest primary day, most expansive primary day on Tuesday that's coming up, 874 delegates at stake. Trump has not won the nomination yet. You need 1,215 delegates to be the nominee. He's got something over 200 right now. So the numbers

don't look great for Haley. She's pretty far behind the path forward on Super Tuesday and the kinds of voters who have voted in past primaries versus who are voting on Super Tuesday seem to favor Trump. So he's likely to do even better on Super Tuesday and be something like 700 delegates or more ahead coming out of that day and could wrap up the nomination by the end of this month as things are trending. So yes, people could vote, right? And that's the thing is that Haley has been winning over a lot of independents who lean Republican that Haley has been winning over a lot of independents who lean Republican, but Trump has been winning over core Republicans. And surprise, surprise, Sarah, you have to win over Republicans to win the Republican nomination.

That is how it works. And the other remedy here could have been that when Trump was impeached after January 6th, that the Senate could have said that they would bar Trump from running for office again, but they chose not to. You know, listen, Domenico, you're the guy who does the numbers in the polls. I don't really do that. But there are some polls out there that suggest that some percentage of voters would not vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted before the election. The issue now is, right now, the only trial that seems to be likely to happen before the election is that District Attorney

Alvin Bragg case over hush money in New York. That's the least serious of all the four criminal cases against Trump. It really is unlikely to carry any jail time. And so if that's the only one that goes to trial before the election, that could be determinative. And we should not forget the Supreme Court had, to some extent, the timing in its own hands after the special counsel Jack Smith last December asked the justices to speed forward and hear the Trump immunity case then. The court decided not to do that. Now it's going to hear that case in the third week of April, and it's not clear at all that D.C. January 6th case will get the way before an election. And it certainly spurred lots of people on the left to say, oh, the court is trying to, you know, help Trump here or enable him. You know, at the same time, it could wind up that you have a case right in the heart of the

general election, as unlikely as that might be. All I can say about all of that anecdotally from talking to lots of Republican voters in primary states in recent months is that most people I talk to who would consider voting for Trump tell me they don't take these legal trials very seriously. They see them the way he describes them as a sign of persecution. And so my big question is, how many people that would be inclined to vote for Trump now would not be if he were convicted. I don't know the answer to that. Well, keyword there is most, Sarah, because this is a country where our elections have been exceedingly close over the past two decades or so. And anything at the margins that doesn't help a candidate get out, especially their base,

like someone like Trump, who hasn't gotten more than 47% in the two elections that he's run previously, any loss of people who had voted for him previously, or even independents who have moved quite considerably to think that Trump has done something illegal, any loss with them would certainly be difficult for him to overcome in a lot of the swing states. That is the show today. We will be in your feeds late tomorrow, early Wednesday with the results from Super Tuesday. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Monsignor, senior political editor and correspondent. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.