Should Colorado be allowed to exclude Trump from the ballot?

A recent decision by the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be on the Colorado 2024 presidential ballot, because he violated the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment.

Most commentators think the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue on appeal. If it does, it will be fascinating to see what the so-called "conservatives" on the Court will do. The true conservative view is that the federal government should stay out of the business of telling the states what to do. But the hypocritical right-wing Supreme Court justices have consistently violated this principle when political realities come into play, as in the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore, when the so-called conservatives voted to interfere in the Florida vote counting process. If the current court repeats this disgrace, it will lose what little respect it still has left.

What the Court should do is to simply stay out of the process. By refusing to take up the case, the Court would allow each state to run its own elections, a part of which is to decide who can appear on its ballots. The issue of whether a candidate qualifies to be on the ballot is multi-faceted. A candidate younger than 35 cannot run. A candidate who is not a natural-born citizen cannot run. A candidate who has already served two terms cannot run. And a candidate who has engaged in an insurrection, having previously sworn an oath to uphold the constitution, cannot run. It is up to each state to determine whether a candidate qualifies to be that state's ballot.

If the Supreme Court does take up the case, the conservative justices will be put in an embarrassing position, because their position has long been one of "originalism", or "textualism", meaning the provisions of the Constitution, and laws in general, should be interpreted as written. Doing that, Trump clearly does not qualify for the ballot, under the clear provisions of the 14th Amendment.

Conservative philosoophy is that the court should not go into the legislative history, when the law as written is clear. But even if they do go into the legislative hisstory, there is an exchange between two Senators on record in which it is clerified that the provision does apply to the presidency, contrary to what the trial judge mistakenly found in this case.