January 6 Is Exactly What the Fourteenth Amendment Was Talking About

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, concerning his role in the January 6 coup attempt, began on February 9, 2021. Almost exactly three years later, on February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over whether that last, desperate effort to illegally hold on to power might now disqualify Trump from returning to the Oval Office.

Many commentators have argued that the nine justices should overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump’s candidacy for reasons of prudence alone. “Keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot could put democracy at more risk rather than less,” the law professor Samuel Moyn warned in The New York Times. “To deny the voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choice … would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy,” the New York columnist Jonathan Chait wrote.

But these arguments ignore that keeping Trump on the ballot is