US Supreme Court rules Trump can remain on presidential ballot

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We're going to be pausing our live coverage shortly. He's a reminder of this morning's ruling by the Supreme Court on Donald Trump's eligibility to run as the Republican Presidential candidate:

• The US Supreme Court has struck down efforts by individual states to disqualify Trump from running for president using an anti-insurrection constitutional clause
• The unanimous ruling is specific to Colorado, but it also overrides challenges brought in other states
• Colorado had barred Trump from its Republican primary, arguing he incited the 2021 Capitol riot but the court ruled that only Congress, rather than the states, had that power

• Trump posted on social media to say the judgement was a "big win for America"
• The former US president issued a press briefing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida where he said the decision was "very well crafted" and will "go a long way towards bringing our country together, which it needs"
• Colorado's Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, said that she was disappointed by the ruling and that "Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot"

Earlier we spoke to Atiba Ellis, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, who says that “while the court’s worries about Colorado’s exclusion of the former president from the ballot are fair, the majority’s decision may have far-reaching consequences".

He says the justices' ruling "opens the door to constitutional interpretation matters that weren’t at issue in the case".

He adds: "The decision throws the problem to Congress at a time when partisan deadlock will guarantee inaction on this matter."

As a result, Ellis tells the BBC it "effectively ensures that the question of the former president’s constitutional eligibility under Section 3 will not be resolved prior to the 2024 election".

With the Supreme Court ruling that only Congress - and not individual states - can enforce Section 3 to block a candidate from federal office, at least one Democrat is already paying attention.

Maryland lawmaker Jamie Raskin, one of the most vocal anti-Trump voices in Congress, told CNN earlier that he is "working with a number of my colleagues... to revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by Section 3".

"The House of Representatives already impeached Donald Trump for participating in insurrection by inciting it," he noted.

Raskin was one of the Democratic 'impeachment managers' who prosecuted the case in its trial phase before the Senate, which ultimately voted to acquit Trump.

Donald Trump has railed often against what Republicans call the "weaponisation of the justice system".

The Republican frontrunner reiterates his belief that he is "being prosecuted by [President Joe] Biden", his likely Democratic opponent.

He takes aim at the various officials investigating him, from Special Counsel Jack Smith to Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis.

He also refers to the recent civil judgement in New York, where he is now liable for nearly half a billion dollars for business fraud. Trump claims he "wasn't given a jury", leaving "a clubhouse judge [to] come up with this number".

"The whole thing is a rigged deal and the public understands it," says Trump.

Trump adds that today's ruling is "a great day for liberty" and again emphasises that "presidents have to be given total immunity".

Trump says this ruling "will go a long way toward bringing our country together, which it needs".

He claims even people in Colorado "thought that was a terrible thing they did" and the decision will help unify his supporters.

The former president addresses all the legal cases against him, arguing that the Supreme Court should again side with him over his claim that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions.

If he is not found to be immune, the role of president will be purely "ceremonial", he claims, when the president should be able to "make decisions free of all terror that can be reigned upon them".

From a podium at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump describes the Supreme Court ruling as a "very important decision, and very well crafted".

Trump says the decision will "be spoken about 100 years from now, 200 years from now".

"You can't take someone out of a race because an opponent would like it that way," Trump adds.

Voters can take a person out of a race very quickly, says Trump, but a court shouldn't be doing that.

Donald Trump is now speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida following the Supreme Court's ruling that Colorado cannot ban him from the presidential ballot.

The court struck down efforts by individual states to disqualify Trump from running for president using an anti-insurrection constitutional clause.

The unanimous ruling is specific to Colorado, but it also overrides challenges brought in other states.

Stay with us as we bring you what Trump says.

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The liberal and conservative justices of the Supreme Court are in clear tension, according to Georgetown law professor David Super's reading of today's opinion.

While the decision itself is not a surprise, he says he was surprised that the court "not only resolved that the states can't [enforce Section 3], but they made it effectively impossible for anyone to implement Section 3 on the federal level".

And the liberal minority - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - were "clearly angry that the majority chose to reach out and decide an issue that wasn't before the court and hadn't really been argued or litigated in lower courts".

Super says their opinion therefore is "harsh" and reads as if the trio "felt that there was no particular reason to hold back in their rhetoric".

"When I saw that it was unanimous, initially I thought it might be that the liberals were voting with the conservatives on this in a nonpartisan way and hoping that [Trump's upcoming case over whether he should be immune from criminal prosecution] would also be handled in a nonpartisan way," he adds.

"But given the anger in [their] opinion, and the fact that the majority clearly didn't care about being called out for reaching an issue that wasn't in front of the court, I don't think the relations between the two wings of the court are in good shape at all."

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One political professor says the Supreme Court's ruling avoids having to answer questions about Trump's involvement in the 2021 US Capitol riot.

Inderjeet Parmar, international politics professor at City University of London says "what the Supreme Court has done in effect is sidestepped the question of the insurrection".

He adds that the Court has also "argued that states have no right to adjudicate on whether or not someone can stand for Federal office, they can adjudicate only, or probably can adjudicate only on those who can stand for State offices".

"So in effect the Supreme Court has pushed over to the US Congress the means by which anybody may be adjudged to have violated that article 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution."

There should be no surprise that the court unanimously rejected this effort, because the justices' scepticism was clear at last month's hearing, says Ray Brescia.

The Albany Law School professor tells the BBC there were "enough off ramps" for the court to choose not to engage with the question of whether or not Trump engaged in insurrection.

Instead they focused on "a denial of due process" that would result from an individual state taking unilateral action and creating the danger of "a patchwork of states with different processes", he says.

"If the court was to allow Colorado to proceed in this way, what's to stop some rogue prosecutor in another state from saying that a candidate from a different party is not a viable candidate because they engaged in insurrection?" he asks.

Brescia adds that Justice Barrett's opinion - emphasising their unanimity over amplifying their disagreement - "was squarely aimed at her liberal colleagues" who made clear they agreed with the judgment but not all of the opinion.

But, he says, "less than a week after they took the immunity case, on a non-accelerated schedule, I think that that was quite rich of her".

How significant is today's Supreme Court ruling? Political commentator, Shannon Felton Spence, says today's judgement "sets up a precedent for every other election going forward".

Spence says it's the first time the Supreme Court has ruled in this way, adding: "The court does not want to be a political body."

Watch as she explains the implications of today's judgement in the clip above.

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Donald Trump says today's Supreme Court decision that he cannot be banned from Colorado's presidential ballot, is "both unifying and inspirational".

Speaking to Fox News, Trump said: "A great win for America. Very, very important!" He went on to highlight another legal case that is set to fall to the Supreme Court: that of presidential immunity.

"Equally important for our country will be the decision that they will soon make on immunity for a president - without which, the presidency would be relegated to nothing more than a ceremonial position, which is far from what the founders intended.

"No president would be able to properly and effectively function without complete and total immunity."

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in April on whether Trump is immune from being prosecuted on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump had claimed that he was immune from all criminal charges for acts that he said fell within his duties as president. A US Court of Appeals panel has already rejected Trump's argument.

This morning's ruling was made in what is known as a "per curiam opinion", meaning that it does not specify who wrote the opinion.

The reliance on per curiam "means that [the opinion] carries less weight", University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias argues.

"The concurrences by four justices reveal more about the Court’s thinking" and the internal dissent that comprises this unanimous decision, he says.

Tobias notes that the liberal justices expressly state that the “majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oath-breaking insurrectionist from becoming President [and] protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision".

Because three concurring Justices “would decide only the issue before us, [they] concur only in the judgment".

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The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) - which filed a brief in support of their party's frontrunner in this case - has hailed the court's ruling.

Ronna McDaniel, who will be stepping down from her RNC post this month, says: "Today's ruling confirms what Republicans have been arguing: the American people get to pick their candidates, not activists or bureaucrats."

McDaniel also describes the initial ruling from Colorado's top court to remove Donald Trump from the state's ballot as, "pure election interference from the left.

"We look forward to continuing to fight and beat Democrats in court over the coming months."

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Allies of Donald Trump are now taking to social media to show their support after the Supreme Court ruling.

Republican senator JD Vance, who was elected off the back of Trump's endorsement, describes it as a "great ruling for our country and the rule of law".

"In America the people decide who the president is," he says.

Representative Byron Donalds, from the hard-right flank of the Republican party, says the Supreme Court has "chosen the side of freedom".

"Colorado's ruling was an unprecedented display of rank political partisanship at the hands of unelected officials," he says.

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says: "Trump stays on the ballot in communist states committing election interference by trying to block Americans from being able to vote for the candidate of their choice!"

The case against Donald Trump in Colorado was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), an ethics watchdog organisation that considers itself non-partisan.

In an email to supporters, CREW President Noah Bookbinder takes solace in the ruling because "while the Court stopped short of removing Trump from the ballot, they did not exonerate Donald Trump for inciting insurrection".

"The Court had the opportunity to clear Trump of the finding that he incited insurrection, and the Court chose not to. Instead it simply ruled that states do not have the power to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment unless Congress says they can," he goes on.

Bookbinder says it is "disappointing" that the court faced a big test and "failed to meet the moment".

"They let Trump off the hook on a technicality," he writes, joining a list of institutions that has "failed to step up and use the tools our Constitution provides to protect us" from imminent threats to democracy.

"But in this ruling, there is a win for our democracy: Trump will go down in history as an insurrectionist."

America's Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump is eligible to remain on the ballot in Colorado, overruling the state's decision to disqualify Trump from the Republican primary ballot.

Watch as BBC North America correspondent Nomia Iqbal explains how a Trump ballot ban could have caused election chaos, and why the judgement was not quite the surprise some thought it would be.

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Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold has released a statement on social media saying she is "disappointed" by the Supreme Court's decision that Colorado cannot disqualify Trump from its presidential primary.

As a reminder, Griswold declined to unilaterally block Trump from the state's primary - the decision came from the state's Supreme Court.

Griswold says the ruling "strips states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment".

"Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot," she says.

Griswold has defended the legal procedures in Colorado that disqualified Trump, but has also expressed her personal views on the case.

After the Supreme Court heard the case last month, she told reporters: "I don't believe that the presidency is a 'get out of jail free' card and I hope the justices hold him accountable."

In the ruling, justices appear to suggest that states can still rely on the 14th Amendment to remove candidates for local elections from the ballot.

The justices observe that while only Congress can strike candidates from federal ballots, historically states retained the power to remove those seeking state-wide office.

"States did disqualify persons from holding state offices following ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment," the justices wrote.

"That pattern of disqualification with respect to state, but not federal offices provides 'persuasive evidence of a general understanding' that the States lacked enforcement power with respect to the latter."

In practice, the court appears to be suggesting that Colorado has the power to strike candidates for governor or the state legislature under the 14th Amendment, but not those seeking federal offices such as election to the US Senate, House or the presidency.