Trump Urges Supreme Court to Reverse Colorado Ballot Disqualification

“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans,” lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump argued.

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to reverse a ruling barring him from the primary ballot in Colorado and to declare him eligible to seek and hold the office of the presidency.

Mr. Trump’s brief, his main submission in an extraordinary case with the potential to alter the course of the presidential election, was a forceful recitation of more than half a dozen arguments about why the Colorado Supreme Court had gone astray in ruling him an insurrectionist barred from office by the Constitution.

“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” the brief said.

The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly, perhaps by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.

The case turns on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.

The Colorado court ruled that Section 3 covers Mr. Trump in light of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The Colorado case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court’s docket or on the horizon. An appeals court is expected to rule in the coming days on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and an appeal to the Supreme Court from that ruling is very likely. And the justices have already agreed to decide on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case against Mr. Trump, with a ruling by June.

Mr. Trump’s brief attacked the Colorado ruling on many grounds. If he persuades a majority of the justices on any one of them, he will prevail. All of Mr. Trump’s arguments are sharply contested, and many of them have come in for withering criticism from prominent legal scholars.

The brief said Mr. Trump himself had not “engaged in insurrection.”

“President Trump never participated in or directed any of the illegal conduct that occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” the brief said. “In fact, the opposite is true, as President Trump repeatedly called for peace, patriotism, and law and order.”

The brief added: “Raising concerns about the integrity of the recent federal election and pointing to reports of fraud and irregularity is not an act of violence or a threat of force. And giving a passionate political speech and telling supporters to metaphorically ‘fight like hell’ for their beliefs is not insurrection either.”

In an earlier brief, Mr. Trump’s lawyers made a broader argument — that the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was not an insurrection at all. The new brief concentrated on Mr. Trump’s own conduct.

“Section 3 is not a vicarious-liability regime,” the brief said, “and there is no legal basis for imputing the conduct of others to President Trump.” It added that Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 was protected by the First Amendment.

The lead lawyer on the new brief was Jonathan F. Mitchell, who rose to prominence as the architect of a novel Texas law that sharply curtailed abortions there by allowing private lawsuits against providers of the procedure.

The brief’s primary argument was that Section 3 did not apply to Mr. Trump because the president was not among the officials covered by the provision. “The president is not an ‘officer of the United States’ as that term is used in the Constitution,” the brief said.

In addition, the brief argued, “Section 3 applies only to those who took an oath to ‘support’ the Constitution of the United States.” But, it continued, “the president swears a different oath set forth in Article II, in which he promises to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States’ — and in which the word ‘support’ is nowhere to be found.”

Along similar lines, the brief also said that the presidency was not one of the offices from which oath-breaking officials were barred. “To accept the Colorado Supreme Court’s assertion that Section 3 includes the presidency, “ the brief said, “one must conclude that the drafters decided to bury the most visible and prominent national office in a catchall term that includes low-ranking military officers, while choosing to explicitly mention presidential electors. This reading defies common sense. ”

The brief said that Section 3 disqualified people subject to it from holding office — not from seeking it. If the candidate were elected, the brief said, Congress could remove that disqualification before the candidate’s term began.

The case from Colorado, Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, attracted several friend-of-the-court briefs filed on Thursday supporting Mr. Trump, including one on behalf of 179 Republican members of Congress, among them Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House.

The brief urged the justices to “minimize the partisan incentive to boot opponents off the ballot using the incredible sanction of Section 3,” adding that “the decision below will only supercharge state officials to conjure bases for labeling political opponents as having engaged in insurrection.”

The brief of the six voters who prevailed in the Colorado Supreme Court, along with friend-of-the court submissions supporting them, are due on Jan. 31.