Booting Donald Trump from the primary ballot in two states has left the 2024 election season in a state of “chaos” that the Supreme Court must step in to fix immediately, experts said on CNN Friday.
They were speaking hours after Maine became the second state in the country to rule that the former president wasn’t eligible to stand for public office. Colorado did the same a week before in a decision that has already been appealed.
“I think it takes it from likely to virtually certain now, that the Supreme Court will take up this case,” the network’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig.
“If we look at the map, the physical map of the United States, now, we have two states as it stands, and this seemingly is changing every few hours. We have two states, Colorado and Maine, who say Donald Trump is out. He is off our ballot. When voters go to the ballot boxes in November, there's going to be one major party name, Joe Biden. And the Republican side, if Donald Trump is the nominee, will be blank."
But, he said, in many other states, similar challenges — based on the 14th Amendment which states anybody who has taken part in an insurrection can’t hold public office — have been unsuccessful.
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“This is the chaos that people feared when it comes to the 14th Amendment,” Honig said.
“... What we're seeing is different states reaching different conclusions through different procedures for different reasons. That's why we need the Supreme Court to give us some uniformity to all of this.”
Spectrum News' Errol Louis agreed.
"The supreme court has to get their hands around this," he said.
There could be chaos. There will be questions whether or not Super Tuesday or any of the other different primaries and caucuses are legitimate. It will start to affect turnout. There will be a secondary wave of lawsuits around all of that. People feeling like they've been disenfranchised. This is the level of chaos we have a Supreme Court to prevent."
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