Former President Donald Trump’s appeal of a Colorado ruling barring him from the ballot may force the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in directly on his 2024 election prospects, a case that legal experts said will likely pull its nine justices into a political firestorm.
That state was the first, followed by Maine, to rule that Trump was disqualified from seeking the Republican presidential nomination due to his actions ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, an unprecedented legal decision that the nation’s top court could find too pressing to avoid.
“I doubt that any of the justices are pleased that they’re being forced into the fray over Donald Trump’s future. But it seems to me that the court will have no choice but to face these momentous issues,” said attorney Deepak Gupta, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court.
The justices, Gupta said, will have to act with “unusual speed and, hopefully, in a way that does not further divide our deeply divided land. That is a daunting and unenviable task.”
This is bizarre. Your statement presupposes that SCOTUS already has “ruling power over the whole constitution” (whatever that means???) AND ignores the entire concept of judicial review. Ever since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, SCOTUS has had the job of interpreting constitutional law for both the federal government and individual states.
Also, SCOTUS is not, as we have recently seen, bound by stare decisis at all. Who or what power is going to bind SCOTUS to previous rulings? SCOTUS has overruled its own prior decisions time and time again, and lost absolutely nothing.
Furthermore, in the United States, the only power constitutionally able to check the judicial is the legislative, and Congress can’t just overturn SCOTUS rulings or demand that SCOTUS not hear cases brought before it.
SCOTUS derives its powers directly from the US Constitution and has already proven over the last 200+ years that it does not gain or lose any powers whatsoever by interpreting (and reinterpreting) that law as requested.
EDITED TO ADD link to Marbury, above, which Wikipedia describes as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law.”