Supreme Court Hears Arguments In Trump 2024 Ballot Case: Live Updates

After a few more brief remarks from Mitchell, today's oral arguments have wrapped up.

Stevenson spoke on the issue of potential retaliation by other states if it's determined Colorado can determine an individual is unable to hold federal office.

"We have to have faith in our system that people will follow election processes appropriately," she said.

"I don't think this court should take those threats too seriously," she added.

Murray's questioning has ended. Up next: Stevenson, speaking on behalf of Colorado’s secretary of state.

Asked by Justice Brett Kavanaugh if disqualifying Trump wouldn’t constitute a mass disenfranchisement of his supporters in the coming election – “What about the background principle, if you agree, of democracy?” Kavanaugh asked – Murray had a succinct, powerful answer. Here’s what he said:

"I’d like to make three points on that, Justice Kavanaugh. The first is that constitutional safeguards are for the purpose of safeguarding our democracy, not just for the next election cycle, but for generations to come.

"Second, Section 3 is designed to protect our democracy in that very way. The framers of Section 3 knew from painful experience that those who had violently broken their oaths to the Constitution couldn’t be trusted to hold power again because they could dismantle our constitutional democracy from within. And so they created a democratic safety valve – President Trump can go ask Congress to give him amnesty by a two-thirds vote, but unless he does that, our constitution protects us from insurrectionists.

"And third, this case illustrates the danger of refusing to apply Section 3 as written, because the reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him, and the constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance."

The court has blown past the 80 minutes it allotted for hearing this case. (That's pretty typical, especially with cases of this magnitude.)

Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters Thomas should have recused himself from this case “for the good of the court, and the reputation and integrity of the court.”

“There is no question that his wife is uniquely positioned in the political debate,” the Democrat said, referring to Ginni Thomas’ involvement in Trump’s effort to overturn the election. “I think it would have been in the best interest of the court and their reputation for him to step aside.”

Durbin, whose committee is responsible for confirming justices to the Supreme Court, has repeatedly criticized Clarence Thomas over allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest.

During a tense moment, Gorsuch pressed Murray on whether a lower official would be able to ignore an order from a president thought to have committed insurrection – but not yet found by a court to have done so. In essence, Gorsuch asked, would members of the military or other government officials be justified in ignoring an order from Trump the day after Jan. 6? That is, if Trump has committed insurrection, what authority does he hold “from that moment” onward? (The unspoken implication of the question is that chaos would reign if lower officials could simply decide to ignore a president they deemed to have engaged in insurrection.)

Murray began his response by invoking the “de facto officer doctrine,” which applies to decisions by someone acting as a government official, but whose status as an official is later found to have been illegitimate.

But Gorsuch stopped him – that doctrine generally applies after the fact, to decisions made under the color of a legitimate officer.

“What would compel a lower official to obey an order from that individual?”

Ultimately, Murray said, statutes and rules require lower officials to follow a chain of command. So as applied to a current sitting office-holder – which is not Trump’s current status – impeachment would be required, he said.

Chief Justice Roberts argued that Trump being kicked off Colorado’s ballot could lead to other future candidates being unfairly removed from state ballots.

“If Colorado’s position is upheld, surely there will be disqualification proceedings on the other side, and some of those will succeed,” Roberts said. “I would expect – although my predictions have never been correct – I would expect that a goodly number of states will say, ‘whoever the Democratic candidate is, you’re off the ballot, and others for the Republican candidate, you’re off the ballot,’ and it will come down to just a handful of states deciding the election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”

Roberts declined to mention the reason that Trump was removed from Colorado’s ballot, which is that Trump actively engaged in trying to overturn the election.

Much of the debate since Murray started speaking has centered on a state making a determination that could disqualify a person from holding federal office.

Murray used his opening statement to remind the U.S. that the high court is even listening to this case because of the riot at the Capitol that Trump incited on Jan. 6, 2021.

"We are here because for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation’s Capitol came under violent assault. For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power,” he said.

“By engaging in an insurrection against the Constitution, President Trump disqualified himself from public office," he added.

Murray argued that, while Section 3 disqualifies insurrectionists, the Supreme Court should “create a special exemption” that applies “to him and to him alone.”

The lawyer also said Trump’s argument differentiating between an “office under” and “an officer of” the United States is unreliable, because “the two phrases are two sides of the same coin referring to any federal office or to anyone who holds one.”

The first justice to question him: Thomas, who refused to recuse himself due to his wife’s involvement in Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

Almost an hour into arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brought up Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and pushed Trump’s lawyer on whether or not Trump himself engaged in insurrection.

Speaking to Mitchell, Jackson discussed Trump’s involvement in Jan. 6, and got Mitchell to admit that being an insurrectionist is not a “categorical” distinction.

"I'm trying to understand the distinction between the provision in the Constitution that relates to disqualification on the basis of insurrection behavior and these other provisions that Justice Sotomayor points out,” Jackson said. “They all seem to me to be extant constitutional requirements, but you’re drawing a distinction."

Mitchell said he is “drawing a distinction because some of them are categorical.”

“What do you mean by categorical?” Jackson asked. “Whether or not you are an insurrection is or is not categorical?”

“It is not categorical," Mitchell replied.

Just after 11 a.m. EST, Murray began his remarks.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on the bench today listening to arguments about whether or not Trump should be on the Colorado ballot despite his own wife’s involvement in trying to overturn Trump’s election defeat.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas has stood by her false claims that the 2020 election that Trump lost to President Joe Biden was fraudulent. Days after the election was called for Biden, Thomas emailed two lawmakers in Arizona to urge them to choose “a clean slate of Electors” and “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.”

Thomas admitted in a deposition last year that she had no evidence of widespread fraud, despite spending weeks behind the scenes attempting to help Trump overturn the results.

When asked about her evidence of fraud, Thomas replied: “I can’t say that I was familiar at that time with any specific evidence.”

Justice Sotomayor is pulling no punches in her lines of questioning for Mitchell.

Trump’s lawyer is arguing that while section 3 applies to officers of the United States, the definition of “officer” excludes the president.

“Bit of a gerrymandered rule, isn’t it?” she asked. “Designed to benefit only your client?”

Mitchell is arguing Trump cannot be considered an "officer of the United States," as mentioned in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, arguing that phrase refers to appointed officials, not those who are elected.

Mitchell argued that Trump shouldn't be taken off the ballot because even if he's considered an insurrectionist thanks to the events of Jan. 6, Congress could step in and pass a law between the 2024 election and the inauguration to "lift the disqualification," allowing him to be president.

Sotomayor notes that historically, states have disqualified people from state offices using section 3 of the 14th Amendment. She cites the case of Jefferson Davis, where a judge ruled his disqualification was self-executing.

“History proves a lot to me, and to my colleagues generally,” she said, referring to the conservative Supreme Court’s move toward originalism. The concept of originalism is used by justices that interpret cases according to how it was understood when it was originally drafted.

When asked by the justice where it is stated that states can’t enforce section 3 of the 14th Amendment on their own, Mitchell referred to “Griffin’s Case,” a circuit court case from 1869 that decided section 3 was not self-executing.

Sotomayor shot back that the case was not Supreme Court precedent and relied on policy, not law.

“So you’re relying on a nonprecedential case by a justice who later takes back what he said,” she said.

Trump’s team started its argument by focusing on the phrase “officer of the United States," which they’ve posited does not include the president under the Fourteenth Amendment, and rather focuses on other appointed positions within the U.S. government.

That represents an extreme minority view of the constitutional text, but Trump’s team is relying heavily on it. The New York Times recently profiled one advocate of this view, Seth Barrett Tillman, calling him a "legal outsider" and “a quibbler” when it came to constitutional interpretation.

You can listen live here.

Trump isn't expected to be in the courtroom today. He is scheduled to give remarks from Mar-a-Lago at 11 a.m. EST.

After that, he's heading to Las Vegas for today's Nevada caucuses.

Norma Anderson, a 91-year-old Republican, is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Trump.

She told The Colorado Sun's Diane Carman she was "appalled" after watching the events of Jan. 6 and "seeing someone trying to overthrow an election."

“If that isn’t insurrection, I don’t know what is," she said.

She told CNN about her involvement with the case, which comes after a long history of political work and activism.

“I didn’t realize I would go down in history as Anderson versus Trump,” she said.

The Supreme Court did not always provide live audio of oral arguments. The practice began in 2020 thanks to the pandemic.

Even after the public was allowed to return to the court in 2022, SCOTUS kept providing the live audio feeds on its website.

Read more at SCOTUSblog.