by The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday handed Donald J. Trump a major victory in the legal battle over his eligibility to return to the White House by allowing the former president to appear on the state’s primary ballot in February.
But in a narrow ruling, the court left the door open to a new challenge to exclude Trump from the general election ballot in the key battleground state for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The decision was the latest in high-stakes efforts to prevent Trump from returning to power. This follows the shocking ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which on December 19 determined in a 4-3 opinion that Trump should be removed from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot for his role in the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Lawyers across the country are venturing into largely uncharted legal territory that could have far-reaching implications for future elections as they argue over a constitutional amendment passed after the Civil War.
The provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, disqualifies from holding office people who served as federal officials and “engaged in an insurrection or rebellion.” The original intent was to prevent Confederate officials from serving in the United States government. But the courts and Congress have not clearly established how the provision should be interpreted today, or how much freedom states have to remove candidates from the ballot.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, said in a statement Wednesday that the state’s high court had correctly concluded that she lacked authority to prevent Trump from appearing on the primary ballot. She but she asked the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly provide guidance on his eligibility to run for office.
“I continue to hope that you will do this as soon as possible to ensure that we can move forward into the 2024 election season with a focus on ensuring that all voters are fully informed and universally engaged in deciding the issues at stake,” he wrote.
Cases across the country are being litigated with enormous urgency because primary voters will begin casting their ballots in Iowa in mid-January.
Trump applauded the Michigan ruling on social networks.
“We have to prevent the 2024 elections from being rigged and stolen like the 2020 elections were stolen,” he wrote on his platform, Truth Social.
Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People, which filed the lawsuit to disqualify Trump, said the Michigan Supreme Court ruled narrowly, avoiding the central issues at the center of the case.
But, stated in a statement“The Michigan Supreme Court did not rule out that the issue of Donald Trump’s disqualification for participating in an insurrection against the United States Constitution could be resolved at a later stage.”
The Michigan primary will take place on February 27.
The question of Trump’s eligibility is expected to be answered by the US Supreme Court. Some form of challenge to his eligibility has been filed in more than 30 states.
Many of those challenges have already been dismissed, and officials in some states, including California, have signaled they are wary of efforts to remove the former president. But several challenges still remain.
Maine’s secretary of state is expected to decide soon whether Trump can appear on the ballot there after a voter challenge under the same section of the 14th Amendment. In Oregon, the same group that filed the lawsuit in Michigan is also seeking to have the courts remove Trump from the ballot, although the secretary of state there refused to remove it in response to a previous challenge.
A key difference between the Michigan and Colorado decisions was that the latter followed a trial that established an evidentiary basis for determining that Trump incited a violent uprising after losing the 2020 election.
In Michigan, lawyers challenging Trump’s eligibility sought a similar trial, but the courts rejected them.
The Michigan ruling included a dissent from Judge Elizabeth M. Welch. While she agreed with the decision allowing Trump to remain on the primary ballot, Judge Welch argued that the court should have issued a more detailed ruling that addressed the legal issues at stake.
Judge Welch said Colorado state law made clear that political parties could only field “qualified” candidates in a presidential primary vote. Michigan election law does not include such a requirement, he wrote. Michigan’s Secretary of State “lacks legal authority to remove a legally ineligible candidate from the ballot once his name has been submitted by a political party,” Judge Welch wrote.
The efforts to disqualify Trump present the U.S. Supreme Court with one of its most politically explosive cases since it resolved the dispute over the 2000 election in favor of President George W. Bush. Since then, the court has become much more conservative, largely as a result of the three justices Trump appointed.
Ashraf Ahmed, a Columbia Law School professor who studies election law, said the U.S. Supreme Court would take up a case on legal issues that have rarely been decided by courts.
“When we talk about how uncharted this is, it is radically new territory,” Professor Ahmed said. “And it’s radically new territory because we’ve never before had a president who could plausibly be implicated under Section 3.”
He said he hoped the court would want to hear the case quickly, but that the justices would most likely avoid delving into the most important issues, such as defining Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Instead, he said, they could rule largely on procedural grounds.
“I suspect the last thing the United States Supreme Court wants to get involved in is the presidential election,” he said.
The Supreme Court of Michigan, a swing state that Trump lost in 2020 to President Biden, is made up of seven justices: three were chosen after being nominated by Democrats, one was recently appointed by the current Democratic governor, and three others were appointed . by a Republican governor and later elected.
A lower court judge previously decided the voting eligibility case for Trump. Judge James Robert Redford of the Michigan Court of Claims ruled in November that disqualifying a candidate using the 14th Amendment was a political issue, not the jurisdiction of the courts. A lower court in Colorado also ruled in favor of Trump before the state Supreme Court took up the case.
Judge Redford also ruled that Michigan’s top elections official did not have the authority alone to exclude Trump from the ballot. Free Speech for People appealed the ruling and asked the State Supreme Court to hear the case on an expedited schedule.
Ms. Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state and a Democrat, echoed the call for a quick decision, citing the approaching deadlines for printing paper primary ballots. She wrote that a ruling was needed by Dec. 29 “to ensure an orderly election process.”
January 13 is the deadline for primary ballots to be mailed to military and foreign voters; Absentee ballots must be printed by January 18.
mitch smith contributed reports.
