In my last two posts, here and here, I suggested that the US Supreme Court will overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s judgment that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from running for President, because he engaged in an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. I argued that the Court would do this because, at bottom, it would conclude that the basics of democratic government require that the disqualification question be resolved by the country’s most authoritative embodiment of electoral process — Congress — not by individual states, and still less by a one-judge margin in one state’s (for now, anyway) supreme court.

I’m feeling pretty good after today’s argument. Of course, I usually feel good when the New York Times’ lead is this glum ...

It would be good for the country and the Court if the judgment here were to be unanimous, and the argument today leaves me with a decent degree of optimism that, notwithstanding John’s doubts about Justice Sotomayor, it will be.