Meet the biggest and baddest new power broker in the 2024 presidential contest: an unelected and unenthusiastic U.S. Supreme Court. If this thought sits a bit uneasily, blame the lawfaring leftists who engineered the sandbagging of the nation’s top jurists.
Less than a month from the Iowa caucuses, the high court faces the prospect of deciding whether Colorado—and other states—can scrub Donald Trump from the ballot on grounds that the leading candidate for the Republican nomination engaged in “insurrection.” It’s also being asked to rule on whether special counsel Jack Smith can prosecute Joe Biden’s top rival for acts related to the riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
That isn’t all. The justices may be asked to settle further unprecedented questions flowing from an array of legal campaigns against Mr. Trump, including a court-imposed gag order in the Jan. 6 case; Mr. Smith’s separate prosecution involving alleged mishandling of classified documents; immunity in a New York defamation suit; and the Georgia state election-interference case. The black robes are already on the hook to pronounce on the Justice Department’s fanciful use of a financial statute that bars “corruptly” obstructing an official proceeding to convict Jan. 6 rioters.
The Supreme Court has had to issue consequential election decisions, most famously in Bush v. Gore (2000). That decision was a consequence of a tight election, the unexpected mess that was Florida’s hanging-chad ballot system, and partisan state judges attempting to rig the counting in Al Gore’s favor.
No one before Election Day planned for the 2000 outcome to land with the U.S. Supreme Court. Today’s pileup of election-related suits, by contrast, was always destined to end up there. Embittered by electoral losses, unwilling to trust the will of voters, the left now routinely turns to extraordinary legal action in hopes of pressing the courts to impose its political objectives by judicial fiat. Every party to these high-stakes, highly speculative cases knew exactly where this would end. And not one cares a whit for the consequences for the high court.
