Which of these scenarios will most closely match the Supreme Court's ruling on whether Trump is eligible for office, if there is one before Election Day? If the ruling is completely different from any of these scenarios, it will resolve to Other. If it an edge case or in-between two of these scenarios, a PROB resolution may be necessary.
I am considering the question of Trump's eligibility to include two factors: Is Trump actually eligible to be president, and are states required to include him or not include him on their ballots? Thus, it is possible, though probably unlikely, that the Supreme Court could rule that Trump is eligible, but that it is a matter of state policy whether he appears on the ballot in individual states, or that SCOTUS could rule that he is ineligible, but that states are still allowed to include him on the ballot even though he can't be elected president.
If the Supreme Court only explicitly rules on one of these questions, I will resolve based on the most plausible interpretation of what that ruling means for the other question and on how the ruling affects state policies regarding his presence on the ballot. E.g., if SCOTUS rules that Trump must be included on the ballot but never explicitly says he is eligible, I would still interpret that as ruling him eligible (unless something in the decision contradicts that) since it doesn't make much sense to say that he's ineligible but must be on the ballot. As another example, if SCOTUS rules that he is eligible to run without explicitly saying that states have to put him back on the ballot, but all states that have removed him put him back on due to interpreting SCOTUS's decision as requiring this, then I would also resolve to, "Trump is eligible to be president and must be on the ballot in all states."
For the purposes of this market, the ruling will still count as saying Trump is eligible to run even if it says something along the lines of, "Trump might be ineligible to run, since he might have committed insurrection, but he hasn't yet been proven guilty of this in court and therefore has to be treated as if he is eligible for now."
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I think the one that best fits with the ruling is, "Trump is eligible to be president and must be on the ballot in all states." Technically speaking, they didn't rule on whether he had committed insurrection or not, which I guess you could say means that they didn't rule whether he was eligible or not, but by ruling that he can't be removed from the ballot, they have made him de facto eligible. Does anyone disagree with this judgement?
@PlasmaBallin Since Trump's name is only mentioned in the historical summary and the case name and doesn't appear as any part of the arguments presented in any of the three opinions, I think you might be wrong.
Is there a reason this market doesn't include conditional inclusion or exclusion resolutions. For instance:
Without a conviction for insurrection, Trump is eligible and cannot be excluded from the ballot citing 14A but would be ineligible if he were convicted of insurrection.
Trump's Jan 6th case starts March 4th and I don't see SCOTUS wanting to keep revisiting this case throughout the year.
@becauseyoudo That would fall under "Trump is eligible", since he hasn't been convicted yet. The reason I didn't include it is because the Supreme Court might not say whether their ruling is conditional or not. Often, SCOTUS will try to rule narrowly on a case, i.e., to decide only what's required to determine the outcome of the case in front of them, and nothing more. A narrow ruling could look like, "Because Trump hasn't been convicted, he's eligible to run, but we make no judgement at this time on whether he would be eligible to run were he to be convicted."
I agree that it's an interesting question whether they will say this or not, but it would require a lot of case handling depending on what exactly the ruling says.
This seems to be awkwardly worded. The Supreme Court is narrowly ruling on whether section 3 of the 14th amendment bars Trump from office.
But there are myriad reasons why a state can keep a candidate off of the ballot. For instance, the candidate could be late filing their candidacy, they may not have the required signatures, they could have violated campaign finance law, they could have committed a felony, etc etc.
If the Supreme Court rules that states cannot bar Trump from ballots based on the 14th amendment, is that the same as stating that Trump "must" be on the ballot for this market?
@EricKramer Yes, that is what was meant by the option, not that the Supreme Court could prevent states from removing Trump from the ballot due to other laws.