A 9-0 judgment masked a 5-4 reasoning split. Working from Article II’s Electors Clause, there’s a cleaner road to the same result than the one the Court took — and it exposes the majority’s reasoning as Wickard-shaped outcome-engineering.
Links: Originalism and the Limiting Document (the keystone — this case is directionally right, reasoning unreasonable), Online Debates (origin: the Destiny × Ryan stream), Legal Theory, Suffrage, Stakeholdership, and the Scope Problem (the lone prior Wickard mention)
Steven “Destiny” Bonell streamed a critique of the 9-0 decision; the lawyer-streamer “Ryan” critiqued that; Destiny joined to spar directly. The surface fight was an authority fight — Ryan: “a 9-0 holds more weight than a layman’s postulating”; Destiny: “there needs to be a legal argument.” This page is the doctrinal musing that came out of watching the layers get conflated. (The case is Colorado — Trump v. Anderson, 600 U.S. ___ (2024) — not Arizona; there were parallel state efforts in Maine, Illinois, etc.)
A vote count is evidence about the holding. A “legal argument” is the ratio decidendi. The decision contains both a rock-solid unanimous chain and a contested 5-4 chain, and each streamer grabbed the layer that flattered his position:
A 9-0 is also not a proxy for correctness — Wickard v. Filburn (1942) was unanimous and is a strong candidate for the worst decision SCOTUS ever made. Unanimity ≠ sound reasoning. Wickard is the methodological sibling of this case: the same outcome-engineering, in the opposite direction (Wickard expands federal power atextually; Anderson’s §5-holding limits §3 atextually).
Why the majority generalized: stopping at “states can’t” would leave §3 potentially self-executing — enforceable by federal courts or by Congress refusing to count electoral votes (a Jan-6 redux). The majority reached for “§5 legislation only” to foreclose all of it.
The §5-exclusivity holding rests largely on Griffin’s Case (1869, Chief Justice Chase riding circuit), which held §3 not self-executing. But Griffin’s Case is (a) a circuit opinion, not binding precedent; (b) widely read (Baude & Paulsen) as results-driven; and (c) in tension with Chase’s own later posture in the Jefferson Davis matter. Meanwhile §3’s text — unlike, e.g., the Fugitive Slave Clause — says nothing about requiring legislation.
So the majority did what Wickard did: substituted pragmatic consequentialism for the text. Wickard wrote aggregation + substantial-effects into “commerce… among the several States”; Anderson wrote an enforcement-legislation requirement into a clause that has none. A Wickard-skeptic has to be suspicious of the Anderson majority’s reasoning on the same methodological grounds — even while cheering the unanimous holding.
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors… but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”
The plenary manner-power is holding, not intuition:
This forces apart three things people collapse into one:
Principal vs. instrumentality. An elector is a state instrumentality with exactly one federal restriction (no Senator/Rep/officeholder); otherwise the choice is the legislature’s. The President is a federal office with federal qualifications (Art II §1 cl 5: natural-born, 35, residency; + 14th Am §3) that the state never had power to set or vary. So “who the elector is” implicates nothing federal; “who is qualified to be President” is wholly federal. The two feel parallel (“who gets chosen?”) but sit on opposite sides of the state/federal line.
U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995): states cannot vary the qualifications for federal office. That’s the structural (not merely pragmatic) answer to “why isn’t the patchwork already permitted by A2S1”: federal-office qualifications are national by design. But Thornton bars adding qualifications; it does not cleanly bar enforcing one the Constitution already contains. §3 is an existing federal qualification — which is exactly the gap the self-execution camp presses, and which the Court papered over.
In the Framers’ design, eligibility-screening lived inside the electors as deliberative agents exercising judgment about fitness. The state owned only the manner of choosing the agents. The judgment — including eligibility — happened at the elector + Congress stage.
What broke it: electors became bound rubber-stamps (party slates → pledge laws → Chiafalo). Once the elector stopped deliberating, the screening function that lived in him got orphaned, and pressure to relocate it pushed toward either the ballot stage (states grab it — Colorado) or the count (the Jan-6 worry). So “states should not be in the business of deciding eligibility” is rigorous, not just appealing: it was never their business — it was the electors’ and Congress’s. Binding the electors didn’t transfer the function to the states; it just orphaned it.
(Open wrinkle: post-Chiafalo, can an elector raise the candidate’s ineligibility as a defense to a faithless-elector penalty? “I couldn’t lawfully cast this vote.” Untested.)
The “legal exit” Destiny couldn’t find isn’t at the state level — it’s federal, and it’s layered:
The 20A explicitly contemplates a winner who then fails to qualify — i.e., eligibility is resolved at the qualification/inauguration terminus, not screened out at a state ballot. Three federal catch-points depending on where the ineligibility bites. That strengthens “let the feds work it out” — there isn’t one fragile exit, there’s a stack. Honest caveat: the 20A is a backstop, not a screening mechanism, and it doesn’t name who decides “failed to qualify.” The forum is genuinely under-assigned — the system has never been stress-tested by an ineligible candidate actually winning. The mess is real; it just lives at the federal terminus, not in 50 state courts.
Trump met age, natural-born, and residency; the only contested item was §3. So Colorado wasn’t doing the harmless clerk-check — it was doing nothing but the contested adjudication that states are worst-positioned to perform and were never assigned. The case strips away every easy part and leaves exactly the thing the rule forbids.
The manner-power lets a state choose its electors and run a ballot; it does not let a state adjudicate a contested federal qualification, because that function was assigned to the electors and Congress at the federal terminus — and binding the electors didn’t transfer it to the states, it just orphaned it.
This disposes of Colorado on cleaner text (A2S1 + 12A/20A + Thornton’s structural principle) than the per curiam used, without inventing the §5-exclusivity rule that produced the 5-4 split — and it’s the minimalist result Barrett and the three liberals were each reaching for from different directions. The uncomfortable consequence the liberals flagged still stands: under the majority’s rule, a self-executing bulwark against insurrectionists becomes contingent on Congress or a §2383 conviction — i.e., on the very political process an insurrectionist might capture.