RNC and 27 GOP State AGs Urge Supreme Court to Reject Colorado 14th Amendment Decision to Boot Trump from Ballot

The Republican National Committee and more than two dozen GOP state attorneys general urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to let Donald Trump's name remain on the primary ballot in Colorado.

The RNC's 34-page amicus brief and another one from the state AGs are among the final burst of court action flooding into the justices as they meet Friday for their first conference huddle of 2024. On their agenda: Whether to take the case of the former president who is trying to avoid losing a chance to run for the White House again due to role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

A decision could come as soon as this afternoon on whether the Supreme Court will accept the request from Trump and his allies to address the sticky constitutional questions at the center of the case.

In the RNC brief, the primary arm of the party called the Colorado Supreme Court's recent decision "historically implausible" and made with a "slew of legal errors that this Court should reject." It said the opinion violates the First Amendment rights of Republicans, as it interferes with political-party primaries.

The RNC also argued that the decision to keep Trump off of the GOP primary ballot "undermines the people’s right to judge who is best to represent them." And it claimed that if Trump is left off of the Colorado primary ballots there will be "chaos in our country" due to the "obvious risk of escalation as political opponents fight to have each other removed from the ballot."

According to the RNC, "the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision threatens massive upheaval to the political process and future national candidates of all parties."

"That chaos is unlikely to be limited to a single candidate or election. Once state courts begin purging candidates from the ballot, political opponents will begin picking each other off, harming confidence in our electoral processes," the brief reads.

Another reason to invalidate Colorado's ruling would be that the state's Supreme Court misread and misinterpreted the 14th Amendment and ignored historical evidence — what they called "imprudence."

The party argues that state Supreme Courts are not the place for such legal disputes, and that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment shouldn't apply to former presidents.

Throughout the brief, the RNC urges the U.S. Supreme Court to take action against Colorado's ruling, finally calling it "primary ballot cleansing."

In the state amicus brief led by Indiana Attorney General Theodore Rokita and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, the states argue in seeking the Supreme Court's "immediate intervention" that Colorado's decision "has vast consequences" beyond the Rocky Mountain State.

"The Colorado court’s decision will create widespread chaos. Most obviously, it casts confusion into an election cycle that is just weeks away. Beyond that, it upsets the respective roles of the Congress, the States, and the courts," wrote the coalition of 27 state Republican AGs and the GOP leaders of the Arizona state legislature.

The states with an attorney general supporting Trump's bid to remain on the GOP primary ballot are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.