(AP) The Supreme Court seems poised to reject attempts to kick former President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot.

A definitive ruling for Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, would largely end efforts in Colorado, Maine and elsewhere to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot.

Conservative and liberal justices alike questioned during arguments Thursday whether Trump can be disqualified from being president again because of his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, ending with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Their main concern was whether Congress must act before states can invoke a constitutional provision that was adopted after the Civil War to prevent former officeholders who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again. There also were questions about whether the president is covered by the provision.

Without such congressional legislation, Justice Elena Kagan was among several justices who wanted to know “why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.”

The outcome could reflect a broad consensus of the court, and it could come quickly.

Eight of the nine justices suggested that they were open to at least some of the arguments made by Jonathan Mitchell, Trump's lawyer at the Supreme Court. Trump could win his case if the court finds just one of those arguments persuasive.

Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded like she might vote to uphold the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that found that Trump “engaged in insurrection” and is ineligible to be president. The state court ruled Trump should not be on the ballot for the state's Republican primary on March 5.

In another sign of trouble for the Colorado voters who sued to remove Trump from the ballot, the justices spent almost no time talking about whether Trump actually “engaged in insurrection” following the 2020 election.

Full details: https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/nation-world/supreme-court-trump-ballot-eligibility/507-75169b6c-82c8-49a9-90e0-114aa61bef99 --

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