Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that the Supreme Court unanimously overturning a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that disqualified former President Donald Trump was a “favor.”
Tribe said, “You should exercise it by reviewing the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, carefully reasoning the elaborate explanation of why what happened in this case was an insurrection and why Donald Trump engaged in it. Based on a trial who’s fairness not a single one of the nine justices questioned in which Donald Trump had ample opportunity to present evidence.”
He continued, “So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court, saying there is ample evidence here in a trial which was fully fair and applied constitutionally appropriate standards, ample evidence to disqualify this oath breaking insurrectionist.”
He added, “In other words, they could’ve gone in either of two directions and there’s only one possible region reason for going in the direction they did. That was that they were doing a favor to oath breaking insurrectionists, in particular, one Donald J. Trump. That is not the way a court should behave. Yes, in a 100 years from now, that is still going to be a lesson in how court should not decide cases. It will be a lesson in how a court by a 5-to-4 decision can fundamentally destroy the Constitution’s deliberate protection against office holding by oath breaking insurrectionists.”
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