MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann predicted that former President Donald Trump will be victorious in overturning Colorado’s ballot ban at the Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from Colorado attorneys arguing to keep Trump off the ballot and the Republican frontrunner’s lawyers. A majority of the justices appeared skeptical of arguments that Trump disqualified himself from running for office by fueling the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Following the hearing’s conclusion, Weissmann gave his reaction to a panel on MSNBC, predicting that Trump clearly has five justices who will rule in his favor, concluding it was going to “be a win for Donald Trump and a loss for Colorado.” He added:

My takeaway from this is if you’re counting the votes, remember, Justice O’Connor famously said when she was asked, “what’s it like to be on the Supreme Court? It’s about counting to five.” Here there is clearly, I think, five votes, if not nine votes that are going to reverse this case. The point that you made about ambiguity was raised by various justices, meaning that if it’s not clear, shouldn’t that sort of favor having somebody being allowed to to run and thus our ability to vote for that person. There was a lot of concern about having a state have the power to interfere with a federal election. It’s not a state interfering with a state election. Should they really be able to weigh in on this?

And then there was an interesting sort of across different Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, who is very active in this, oral argument, talking about the history of this amendment, talking about how it really dealt with the Confederacy and the concern about Confederates burrowing in to Confederate States and sort of influencing federal elections. And so it would be anomalous, it would be ironic to suddenly say, oh, we should allow states to take this on. It’s a reason to have federal jurisdiction here, not state jurisdiction. Big takeaway is this is, I think, going to be a win for Donald Trump and a loss for Colorado.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.

The post MSNBC Legal Analyst Throws in the Towel On the Prospect of SCOTUS Upholding Trump Ballot Ban: ‘There’s Clearly Five Votes… If Not Nine’ first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/NYLyIbu