Legal Experts Agree: Only Voters, Not the Supreme Court, Can Save Us From Trump

The U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous ruling Monday that individual states cannot bar Donald Trump from running for a second White House term dashed any lingering hope that the nation's highest judicial body—dominated by conservatives and glaringly corrupt—would save the country from the former president and would-be authoritarian, making clear only voters stand between him and another four years in power.

A number of experts, analysts, and newspaper editorial boards underscored that reality in the wake of Monday's widely expected ruling as well as its decision last week to review Trump's claim that he's immune from criminal prosecution for any actions he took while in office—including his active and coordinated attempts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.

At Slate, UCLA law professor Richard Hasen and court writer Dahlia Lithwick argued Monday that "we need to stop deluding ourselves that a majority of the Supreme Court sees the same political emergency that many of us do in terms of the threat Trump poses to American democracy."

"The high court ensured this past week that Trump is extremely unlikely to have a jury decide if he engaged in election subversion before voters cast their ballots for the next U.S. president this fall," the pair added. "It's clear that if anyone is going to save American democracy, it is going to be the voters."

Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, echoed that message, telling The Washington Post that the "real takeaway" from Monday's ruling is that "the courts aren't going to save us from ourselves."

"The only surefire way to ensure that an anti-democratic candidate for president doesn't succeed," Vladeck said, "is to beat him at the ballot box."

"If Trump is to be prevented from returning to the White House, he must be rejected by the voters and denied a majority in the electoral college."

The Supreme Court's rejection of efforts to remove Trump from state primary ballots despite the clear language of the 14th Amendment's Insurrection Clause came a day before millions of voters in 15 states and one U.S. territory headed to the polls for their Democratic and Republican presidential primaries.

Super Tuesday's primary contests are expected to further solidify Trump's position as the presumptive GOP nominee—even as he faces more than 90 criminal charges—and spotlight the enormous stakes of the November election, which the former president's far-right allies see as a critical opportunity to advance their assault on reproductive rights, climate regulations, Medicare, and more.

"It is now clear that if Trump is to be prevented from returning to the White House, he must be rejected by the voters and denied a majority in the electoral college," the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times wrote Monday. "Neither the Supreme Court nor the Constitution will relieve voters of the responsibility to face facts about his obvious unfitness for another presidential term."

Vox senior correspondent and Supreme Court reporter Ian Millhiser noted the glaring flaws and alarming implications of the Supreme Court's recent decisions favoring Trump but argued that the nation's nine justices—three of whom were handpicked by the former president—should never have been seen as a potential firewall against an authoritarian assault on democracy like the one Trump and his allies are promising.

"No one is coming to save us—not the courts, not the Constitution, and certainly not a process for choosing candidates that has not been used since the 1960s," wrote Millhiser, referring to the suggestion that Democrats replace President Joe Biden as their candidate at the party's nominating convention in the face of alarming poll results.

"No one is coming to save us from Donald Trump," Millhiser added. "We have to do it ourselves."