‘The Colorado Supreme Court Got It Right’: Neal Katyal on Trump’s Disqualification from Office

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
CAPEHART: “Neil, you said that oral arguments did not go well for the Colorado attorney’s trying to disqualify Trump. What kind of ruling are you expecting from the justices?”
KATYAL: “Yeah, and I think that was probably an understatement, Jonathan. So, I think the real problem here was that the Colorado Supreme Court was pretty much defenseless when it came to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court. There wasn’t any real defense of their decision. And it’s really too bad, because the Colorado Supreme Court, I think, got it right. There is a right legal answer to these questions, and it begins and ends with the idea that someone who is an adjudicated insurrectionist, as Donald Trump was, has no business serving in our government, particularly at the highest levels. Unfortunately, I don’t think that came out at all. And so, I suspect that the court is looking for an off-ramp, and probably the easiest one is the idea that Congress hasn’t passed a law to implement the 14th Amendment Section 3 — that’s a little level — because Congress hasn’t passed a law to implement other parts of the 14th Amendment, like say, the equal protection clause. But, there are some technical ways to try to distinguish the other parts of the 14th Amendment. And that might provide an attractive off-ramp because right now, the only thing the court heard was how dangerous, as Justice Kagan said in that interchange you just played, how dangerous it would be to allow Colorado to kick someone off of the ballot. We never got the flipside, which was that after the Civil War, our founders coming together and saying, how dangerous it would be if an insurrectionist were to serve in our government.”