The Supreme Court is not going to let Colorado, or any other state, remove Donald Trump from the ballot in 2024. That’s the upshot of Thursday’s arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the blockbuster case contesting the former president’s constitutional ability to run for office. A clear majority of justices expressed overwhelming skepticism toward the plaintiffs’ claim that Trump is disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment because he “engaged in insurrection.” The only real question is what rationale the court will use to reject that theory—though one emerged as a probable consensus: Justices across the ideological spectrum suggested that individual states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates, at least not without congressional approval.

Different justices may concur with additional rationales. Justice Sonia Sotomayor might pen a lone dissent. But all in all, this goose is cooked. The Supreme Court’s last remaining challenge is to put meat on the bones of the justification it lands on, and that task may prove harder than it looks. The notion that individual states can’t take unilateral action to strip federal candidates from the ballot has immense practical appeal, and arguably aligns with broader constitutional principles. But it is not what Section 3 says on its face, nor is it clearly borne out by the original meaning of the amendment. Many of the justices’ questions on Thursday amounted to policy arguments thinly cloaked in the language of textualism and originalism. With some exceptions, though, these questions began from the premise that states can’t possibly be allowed to take Trump off the ballot, and worked backward from there. That’s not an illegitimate way to do law. But it is not how this Supreme Court claims to do law.

Anderson has its roots in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump allegedly incited an insurrection to stop Congress from counting electoral votes, thereby certifying his defeat. In 2023 a group of Colorado voters sued in state court to block the former president from appearing on the ballot in the upcoming election. They cited the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, which was ratified in 1868 to prevent ex-Confederates from returning to office. As relevant here, Section 3 states that former officeholders are ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,” if they have previously “engaged in insurrection.” Only Congress can remove this “disability” by a two-thirds vote in each house.

In December, the Colorado Supreme Court sided with these plaintiffs by a 4–3 vote, ordering Trump off the ballot. The court made four central claims: First, it held that the president is an “officer” subject to the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause. Second, it held that Trump “engaged in insurrection” as defined by the amendment. Third, it held that the amendment was “self-executing,” meaning that states could enforce it without congressional action. Fourth, it held that the state judiciary afforded Trump due process throughout the proceedings. Taken together, the court held, these conclusions prevented Trump from running in the primary and from competing for Colorado’s 10 electoral votes come November.

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