Supreme Court

=== Colorado and the SC ===
The legal challenge hinges on a Civil War-era constitutional amendment that bans anyone who has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" from holding federal office. In its judgement in December, the Colorado Supreme Court said Mr Trump's actions during the 2021 Capitol riot amounted to insurrection, and the state's attorney repeated that claim on Thursday. 
Most of the tough questioning went to lawyer Jonathan Murray, representing the five Coloradoans, who originally sued to kick Mr Trump from the ballot. 
One of the three court members nominated by Mr Trump, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, challenged him about the potential "disenfranchising effect" of kicking Mr Trump from the ballot, by not allowing citizens to cast their votes as they wanted. Mr Murray said "the reason we're here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him" during the violence on 6 January 2021, where rioters tried to stop congress from certifying that Mr Biden won the 2020 election. 
Mr Trump's team fought back against that allegation, telling justices that the event was "a riot, not an insurrection". "The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all of those things but did not qualify as an insurrection as that term is used in Section 3," Mr Trump's attorney Jason Mitchell told the court. 
Justices on both wings of the court appeared reluctant to uphold the Colorado ban, subjecting Mr Murray to a barrage of complex legal queries as the morning went on. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that if the court upheld the Colorado ruling it could unleash chaos on the US political system by granting states the unilateral power to strike candidates from the ballot  
::* > cit. bbc, febr. 8, 2024
=== Weblinks === 
* Takeaways from the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Trump 14th Amendment case. By John Fritze, Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen, CNN, Thu February 8, 2024