US Supreme Court hears arguments on Donald Trump's eligibility to be President

The US Supreme Court has today started hearing arguments in a landmark legal case that will determine whether Donald Trump is eligible to become President in November's elections.

In 2023, the top court in the Colorado district said that Trump would not be eligible to be on the ballot because he breached section three of the 14th Amendment, which bans anyone who has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" from becoming President.

It's being argued that Trump engaged in insurrection over the US Capitol riots in 2021, when he had lost the previous year's election to Democrat, Joe Biden.

This case has been brought to the Supreme Court after Trump and his legal team appealed the ruling in Colorado, something that Trump has called election interference, stopping the presidential race being "free and fair".

The US's top nine justices will now hear the appeal, and their ruling will apply nationwide, as many other states also have cases on their docket that seek to disqualify Trump from the 2024 elections.

Trump's main attorney for this case, Jonathan Mitchell, set out his key argument as to why Trump should not be disqualified. He says that the President is not "an officer of the United States". and therefore section three of the 14th amendment doesn't apply to him.

Section three of the 14th Amendment specifically bars "an officer of the United States" who has taken the oath of office and engaged in insurrection from holding public office.

Mitchell further argued that section three cannot be used to exclude a candidate for President, and that a state cannot exclude a candidate. This appeared to be a delaying tactic, which would allow Trump on the 2024 ballot, but could then be argued if elected.

It's unlikely that if Trump was to be elected, he would be forbidden to take up the Presidency for a few reasons. Mainly, if elected, he would have democratically been chosen as the next President, something that lawmakers would be unwilling to ignore.

Answering questions from the court, Mitchell stated that no Secretary of State has the authority to remove a candidate based on section three, "even if the candidate is an admitted insurrectionist".

He argues that only Congress can enforce section three, and only by removing them after they have been elected, not by removing them from the ballot before the election. Mitchell states that this happened frequently in the Civil War era.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices, responds: "History proves a lot to me, and to my colleagues, generally. And there's a whole lot of examples of states relying on Section 3 to disqualify insurrectionists for state offices," she says.

Sotomayor says Mitchell is basically asking the justices to go "three steps" beyond direct interpretations of section three to accept his arguments,

"You want us now to say it means that Congress must permit states or require states to stop insurrectionists from taking the state office," Sotomayor asks. "This is a complete pre-emption in a way that's very rare."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson listed off the offices that are explicity mentioned in the constitution to try and define an "officer of the United States". She notes that the President is not on it.

A ruling will not come today, and so far the Supreme Court hasn't given any indication of when it will be.