Similarly, any good-faith reading of the Constitution would show that the name of Donald Trump cannot be placed on a presidential ballot this year because, as the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol determined, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.” No congressional resolution or court ruling is necessary to settle the issue. Reality is sufficient.

As US Representative Jamie Raskin, the constitutional law professor who served as a member of the January 6 committee, points out with regard to the 14th Amendment, “The language is totally plain. If you’ve sworn an oath to support the Constitution and you violate that oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion, you can never hold office again, unless the Congress votes by a two-thirds margin to essentially reinstate your eligibility. That’s what the Constitution itself says.”

Lawyers on both sides of the issue will, undoubtedly, go into considerable detail during today’s Supreme Court hearing on Trump’s appeal of a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that declared him ineligible to appear on that state’s 2024 presidential ballot.

It is expected that Trump’s legal representatives will roll out the fantastical argument that, because the amendment does not mention the presidency, it does not apply to Trump—as if it the framers of the amendment, which was written with the initial goal of barring those who supported the 1861–65 Confederate rebellion against the United States from holding office in the post–Civil War era, intended to carve out an exception for former Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis. (In an 1868 court trial, Davis’s own lawyers filed an affidavit acknowledging that he had sworn an oath to the Constitution in 1845, which, an analysis published by the National Constitution Center explained, “placed him within Section 3’s disqualification.”)

Trump’s lawyers are also expected to argue that an insurrectionist must be convicted in the courts or by Congress to be disqualified—as if a 27-year-old like Frost could mount a presidential bid as long as he weren’t convicted of underage campaigning. Lawyers with the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have explained in briefs for cases involving efforts to remove Trump from state ballots:

Both the Fourteenth Amendment’s text and Supreme Court precedent confirm that Section 3 is self-executing and can be enforced without federal legislation. Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, state courts must enforce Section 3 where state law allows, and historically state courts have done exactly that. The Supreme Court has also consistently held the substantive provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments—including the Fourteenth Amendment—to be self-executing. Supreme Court precedent also makes clear that congressional action cannot be required to activate Section 3.

Today’s Supreme Court hearing will uncork plenty of partisan punditry and positioning. But legal scholars recognize the issue at hand as a question of whether the court is prepared to embrace “a very straightforward textualist application of the Constitution,” as conservative judges are always saying they do.

“This is a chance for these justices to show that they really mean it when they talk about textualism, when they talk about originalism. The plain text of the Constitution could not be any clearer,” Raskin—who was a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years before his election to the House—told CNN in December.

Of course, textualism does not always rule the day on the current high court. In fact, the safest bet is that this court, with its supermajority of Republican-appointed justices—three of them picked by Trump himself—and a history of blatantly partisan conflict of interest scandals, will bow to the demands of the party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee.

But they do not have to do so, says Raskin. They could recognize the reality of the situation: “If Donald Trump is not disqualified from holding office again after what he did on January 6 and in the weeks leading up to it, then who is disqualified? Why would they read an entire provision out of the Constitution?”

As the House’s preeminent constitutional scholar says, “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”