'Ideological strains' on the Court as Amy Coney Barrett admonishes liberals in 'unusually biting terms'

05 March 2024

When the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its unanimous 9-0 ruling in Trump v. Anderson on Monday, March 4, all of the justices agreed that the Colorado Supreme Court was wrong to exclude 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump from the state's election ballot based on Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

Section 3 states that an "officer" who has engaged in "insurrection" is ineligible for certain political positions.

But while Trump v. Anderson struck down the Colorado ruling — and, by extension, similar rulings in Maine and Illinois — there were some key differences in their reasoning. Five GOP-appointed justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts) ruled that states cannot remove a federal "officer" from a state ballot unless Congress has passed legislation, but three Democratic appointees (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson) didn't go that far.

CNN Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskup, in an article published on March 5, lays out some ways in which far-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the wild card in Trump v. Anderson.

"Justice Amy Coney Barrett packed two very different messages into her one-page opinion on Monday as the Supreme Court declared states could not toss former President Donald Trump off the ballot," Biskupic explains. "She chastised her colleagues on the right for breaking significant — and in her mind, unnecessary — ground in the breadth of their legal reasoning. But then she admonished the Court's three liberal justices, who also split from the majority's legal rationale, in unusually biting terms."

Barrett wrote that "this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency." But Biskupic argues that Barrett's opinion "had the effect of highlighting the tensions between ideological factions and the power of the conservative majority, rather than neutralizing them."

"Liberal justices, often in the dissent, regularly adopt a caustic tone," Biskupic observes. "It was paradoxical that Barrett herself, in rebuking them on Monday, chose words with more bite than usual. The ideological strains inside the Court will likely grow as the justices hear another chapter of Trump election-related litigation in April and begin issuing decisions this spring on various challenges to Biden Administration policy."

Joan Biskupic's full CNN analysis is available at this link.

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