The Supreme Court's three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — included a "warning" to the court's conservative majority in their concurring opinion in former President Donald Trump's ballot case, says MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
The court on Monday unanimously ruled that states cannot remove Trump from the presidential primary ballot but the court's liberals split on the majority's ruling that only Congress can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
"In the concurrence from Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, a warning of sorts in my view to some of the other justices saying, we didn't need to decide anything more here than the principle that states don't have the authority to disqualify candidates for federal offices," Rubin said Monday.
"By going further than that," Rubin added, "and saying that only Congress has that enforcement power, 'You have decided something that didn't need to be done,' and they say, 'We protest the majority's efforts to use this case to define the limits of federal endorsement of that provision because we would only decide the issue before us. We concur only in the judgment.'
"They're saying, this is a warning, right?" Rubin added. "This is a shot across the bow. 'Don't decide anything you don't have to. Let's not do that.' That's what I read in that."
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