George Conway says he can’t ‘make heads or tails’ out of Trump Supreme Court ballot opinions

Conservative legal commentator George Conway ripped into the Supreme Court justices’ majority and concurring opinions when restoring former President Trump to Colorado’s primary ballot, calling it “shoddy legal work all around.”

“I think they did have a very difficult time with it, because I don’t think any of the three opinions make any sense whatsoever,” Conway said when asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins what he made of the unanimous ruling. “I think these opinions are fundamentally arbitrary.”

“I mean, they totally rejected Trump’s principal arguments, which were that the president is somehow not an officer of the United States and the other argument, which was that he did not participate in an insurrection,” the lawyer, who is currently in the process of divorcing former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, added in the Monday interview.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the Centennial State cannot disqualify Trump from its state’s primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection ban, overturning the state Supreme Court’s late December ruling.

The decision is a significant legal victory for Trump, who has faced dozens of challenges to his eligibility from voters and advocacy groups across the country arguing he participated in an insurrection through his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“Notwithstanding Donald Trump declaring victory, he remains an adjudicated insurrectionist after this opinion, because the Supreme Court did not in any way, undercut or contradict or suggest in any way there was any infirmity in the actual findings made by the lower courts,” Conway said.

Pressed further on his opinion, he added that Trump is “unquestionably an insurrectionist.”

“I mean, it would’ve been absurd for the court to try to define what it means to engage in an insurrection and to engage in what an insurrection is to try to fit it to get Donald Trump off the hook,” he said. “And that’s what … the court was terrified about. They didn’t want to go there.”

All nine justices sided with Trump, the current GOP front-runner in the White House race, though the court’s three liberals and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote separately to criticize the five conservatives for going further than needed to resolve the case. 

Barrett, a Trump appointee, argued the Colorado appeal did not “require” the court to “address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.” She said these sorts of decisions should “turn the national temperature down, not up.”

Conway, a staunch critic of Trump was later asked about the three liberal justices’ opinion, which stated the majority improperly decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and [Trump] from future controversy.”

He said he could not figure out exactly what the justices were discussing, claiming he could not “make heads of tails out of the concurring opinions any more than I can make heads or tails out of the majority opinion.”

“It’s just shoddy legal work all around,” Conway argued.

He explained that he didn’t think the majority’s opinion was an overreach, but rather “an underreach.”

“You can see the sort of terror in the opinions and the concurring opinions. I mean, Justice Barrett was just … her opinion just exuded fear of the political consequences of the decision,” Conway said.

“It’s criticisms of the majority opinion [that] actually end up undermining the concurrence’s own opinion as to the result in the case which was to affirm,” he added later.