AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File

The Supreme Court of the United States issued a much-anticipated opinion Monday morning, unanimously rejecting a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that disqualified former President Donald Trump from the ballot.

The Colorado decision was based on a lawsuit brought by voters in the state under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that Trump’s actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol fell under that section’s language barring those who had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding federal office.

Colorado’s move had divided legal scholars, with some objecting because the ex-president had not yet been convicted of the crime of insurrection — an argument that others like author and George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin rejected based on the legislative history of Section 3, which was passed to target the “completely unrepentant” former Confederates who were seeking election to Congress. Still, others like CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig had predicted Colorado would find itself overturned by the nation’s highest court because of the due process implications of the extraordinary remedy of barring someone from the ballot.

The opinion was issued per curiam, written by the court as a whole without any individual Supreme Court Justice’s name as the author. The end result was not viewed as much of a surprise by observers of the court, as the oral arguments on the case last month had featured highly skeptical questions from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that mostly veered away from the question of whether or not Trump himself met the definition of an “insurrectionist.”

Instead, they focused on whether the language of Section 3 was intended to include former presidents — an issue that sparked several questions from the liberal justices as well. The justices also dug into whether it was possible to ban a candidate from the ballot without Congress first enacting a law, and if removing a candidate from the ballot was “disenfranchising voters to a significant degree,” as one notable inquiry from Justice Brett Kavanaugh went.

“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the opinion read.

There were two concurring opinions that expressed disagreement with the scope, but not the result, of the Court’s opinion.

The first, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, declared her agreement with the ruling “that States lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates,” but said that she would have stopped short of ruling that only Congress can enforce Section 3, and cited the importance of the Court’s unanimity on this case:

That principle is sufficient to resolve this case, and I would decide no more than that. This suit was brought by Colorado voters under state law in state court. It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.

The majority’s choice of a different path leaves the remaining Justices with a choice of how to respond. In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. 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. 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.

The second, by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, similarly objected to the Court’s opinion for going “further” than they believed was necessary to decide the case, quoting a passage from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.”

The concurring justices continued:

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. In this case, the Court must decide whether Colorado may keep a Presidential candidate off the ballot on the ground that he is an oathbreaking insurrectionist and thus disqualified from holding federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Allowing Colorado to do so would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles. That is enough to resolve this case. Yet the majority goes further. Even though “[a]ll nine Members of the Court” agree that this independent and sufficient rationale resolves this case, five Justices go on. They decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy. Although only an individual State’s action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so. The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment.

Read the full opinion here.

This is a breaking news story and has been updated with additional content.

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