The Daily Fuckup

The Michigan ballot fight over Donald Trump was still a filing, not a ruling, on Nov. 16, 2023. That day, plaintiffs asked the Michigan Supreme Court to take the case immediately and bypass the Court of Appeals. The court did not do that on Nov. 16; it was only receiving the emergency application. citeturn0search0turn0search1

The court later denied the request to skip the intermediate appeal on Dec. 6, 2023. After the Court of Appeals acted on Dec. 14, the state high court later declined to hear the case on Dec. 27, ending that round of review and leaving Trump on Michigan’s 2024 primary ballot at that point. citeturn0search0turn0search1

The dispute turned on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the post-Civil War clause that bars some former oathholders from office if they engaged in insurrection or rebellion. The Michigan filing pressed the same basic question raised in other states: whether Trump’s conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack made him constitutionally ineligible for the ballot. The Nov. 16 filing did not answer that question. It asked for expedited review, and the court said no. citeturn0search0turn0search1

The sequence mattered because it showed how the ballot dispute was being processed in pieces: first an emergency application, then a refusal to fast-track it, then a later denial of review. None of those steps produced a national ruling, and none of them resolved the constitutional question beyond Michigan. What they did settle, for the moment, was procedure. citeturn0search0turn0search1