Reuters Interviews California Western School of Law Professor Nancy Marcus on Supreme Court’s Trump Decision

Nancy Marcus, Associate Professor of Law at California Western School of Law (CWSL), provided her expert analysis on former President Trump’s eligibility to run again and the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale in reversing the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Trump from Colorado’s primary ballots. 

In the interview with Reuters, Professor Marcus noted that “the repercussions for the case are going to be immediate… states are not going to be able to remove Trump from their ballots.” Regarding the Supreme Court’s reasoning, she commented that “All of the justices agreed. They were very worried about having a patchwork system, if you have states coming to different conclusions about what the Fourteenth Amendment means for their elections.”

Professor Marcus also noted that the Supreme Court chose to sidestep the question of whether Trump did, in fact, participate in an insurrection on January 6, 2021: “The Court did not reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s findings that Trump had engaged in an insurrection… They didn’t reverse the conclusion that Trump was, in theory, prohibited from running for office. What the Court did say is that under the Fourteenth Amendment only Congress, not the states, can enforce Section 3.” 

Looking to what might happen next, Professor Marcus suggested that “the [Court’s] majority opinion could be hinting that Trump’s candidacy is still vulnerable to attack… through federal congressional processes,“ and that “the Department of Justice might have some avenues to pursue here, if they believe that Trump engaged in insurrection.”

An excerpt of the interview can be found on Reuters here and a longer version of the interview can be seen here.