The Daily Fuckup

The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump a clear election-year break on March 4, 2024, when it unanimously reversed Colorado’s effort to keep him off the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The decision came the day before Super Tuesday, when the Republican race was about to be tested in a wave of primaries and caucuses. For Trump, the immediate effect was simple: the Colorado ballot bar was gone.

The legal holding was narrower than the political fight surrounding it. The justices did not rule on whether Trump engaged in insurrection. They did not erase the record that led to the Colorado case. And they did not close the book on the larger argument over Jan. 6. What they said, in substance, was that individual states do not have authority to use Section 3 on their own to disqualify a federal candidate.

That left the underlying controversy intact. The Court resolved who may enforce Section 3 against federal candidates, not whether Trump’s conduct on and around Jan. 6 meets the constitutional standard that opponents have argued should apply. The ruling also shifted the enforcement question away from state-by-state disqualification efforts and back toward federal actors and constitutional processes.

Trump got the result that mattered most in the short term: he stayed on the Colorado ballot and avoided the kind of patchwork exclusion that could have thrown the primary season into deeper confusion. But the opinion was not a clean bill of health. It settled the state-law question. It did not settle the historical or political one.