Supreme Court Accidentally Forgets To Delete Basic Metadata In Trump Ballot Ruling

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Someone inside the Supreme Court offices today.

Everyone knows the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted and ratified in the shadow of the Civil War by a populace deeply concerned about preventing those who try to undermine the Republic by force from ever holding elected office off the back of the mob, but what the United States Supreme Court presupposes is… maybe it wasn’t. With apologies to the Royal Tenenbaums, the unanimous Court decided that only Congress — and not the individual states — can enforce Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to keep a presidential candidate off a ballot.

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How can states keep people under 35 or those who aren’t natural born citizens off their ballots? Maybe the Court’s Marauder’s Map copy of Article II says something about it being self-executing? Whatever! They don’t care! The point is, the Supreme Court agrees 9-0 that Colorado can’t kick Trump off the ballot.

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Except… they didn’t all agree with the majority opinion. Rather than kick Colorado to the curb by simply acknowledging that having patchwork election laws — a reality that the Supreme Court explicitly endorses when it comes to state-by-state voter suppression — would create “a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles,” to quote the dissent.

Oh wait… did I say “dissent”? Because there were no dissents, only concurrences crafted to convey the Court’s unity of purpose. Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence criticizes the majority’s decision to go beyond resolving the dispute at hand to craft an unnecessary framework to further neuter that Fourteenth Amendment, but it’s expressly not characterized as a dissent.

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OR WAS IT?

If you double click where it says "JJ." at the top, then copy and paste it, that line reads: SOTOMAYOR , J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.

And if you do a control-F search for "SOTOMAYOR , J., concurring in part and dissenting in part," it highlights that same line. pic.twitter.com/JEhuTdSibZ

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 4, 2024

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The Supreme Court: Our deliberations must be kept in the highest secrecy!
Also the Supreme Court: [Butt dials a reply all]

So now we know that, at some point, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed to drop the word “dissenting” from the opinion to salve the majority’s feelings and the Court just smashed the red publish button without taking the time to scrub it.

Didn’t every attorney figure this out a decade ago?

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What did the liberals get in exchange for softening — at least in title only — their opinion? Who knows? Maybe the eventual Trump immunity opinion will include some hints.

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Perhaps buried in the metadata.

Earlier: John Roberts SHOCKED By Prospect Of Presidential Elections Decided By ‘Handful Of States’
John Roberts SHOCKED By Prospect Of Presidential Elections Decided By ‘Handful Of States’

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Topics

Courts, Supreme Court, Technology