A welcome nod from the Supreme Court

We said before he was elected in 2016 that we considered Donald J. Trump unfit for the office of president of United States. Time and again during his administration, we found cause to justify that assessment and said so. After he lost the election, he continued to demonstrate his unfitness as he invited throngs of supporters to join him in a protest of what he described as an unfair election and then encouraged them to march on the nation's Capitol to disrupt the official certification of his successor. In his bid to regain his seat, his rhetoric has only grown even more hyperbolic, divisive and vitriolic, deepening our conviction that he should not be considered a serious candidate for president and would be a destructive, chaotic leader should he re-ascend to the nation's highest office.

Yet, even with all this, we have taken no pleasure in seeing him thrown off the ballot on presumed constitutional grounds in two states, embattled in dozens of others and now challenged on those grounds in our own. So, we welcome the U.S. Supreme Court’s agreement to hear Trump’s challenge of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling disqualifying him from that state’s primary ballot.

The matter of Trump’s candidacy involves two key, but very different questions. One, is he fit to serve? That is a question for voters to answer. Two, is he qualified to serve? That is a question comprising both political and legal judgments, and so far, the legal arguments, regardless of their validity or lack of it, have been dominated by rulings that have the appearance if not the reality of being partisan. The decision in Colorado came from a court with a Democratic majority. A similar decision in Maine came from a Democratic secretary of state. Efforts last week to remove the former president from primary ballots in Illinois and Maine are led by a liberal advocacy group, and, in Illinois’ case particularly, should the issue follow the appeals process to its logical conclusion, as is likely, it would reach a state Supreme Court dominated by Democrats.

Whether or not all these Democratic courts and officials have made or would make the correct decision in declaring Trump unqualified, the collective impression of their actions, especially without any apparent sign of Republican concurrence, serves only to embolden the former president in his cries of being victimized by supposed deep-state forces determined to prevent Americans from returning him to the presidency and encourage voters susceptible to this delusion.

There is, of course, no assurance that the U.S. Supreme Court - especially this Supreme Court, about which Trump bragged Friday that he “fought really hard to get three very, very good people in” — will agree that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution disqualifies him. If it does, the court — especially this court — will have gone a long way toward blunting complaints of an unconstitutional vendetta against him. But even if it does not, depending on its justifications, the court could be performing a service by stemming all the independent efforts to strip him from the ballot and removing that issue from the political arena.

Which, naturally, would move the question of Trump’s candidacy out of the legal arena and leave it entirely in the hands of voters. Whether that outcome is entirely ideal we are not prepared to say, but it is certainly better than the partisan storms that have been developing in recent months.

We long for a coming presidential campaign focused on who can best lead the nation to prosperity, unity and security in the next four years. The distraction of an overriding debate over a supposed elitist conspiracy can have no result but for deeper divisions among our people and further deterioration of faith in our government and our election system.