“It’s up to the Supreme Court.” These days the phrase is as much a statement of fact when it comes to a major legal issue that the justices will resolve as it is a cause for concern. After all, in the past two years alone, the conservative supermajority of justices installed by Donald Trump has upended the law on abortion, gun control, voting rights, affirmative action, executive power, and discrimination in public life.

The same group of justices is now poised to consider two major legal questions that will significantly shape — and perhaps even indirectly determine — the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Court’s handling of these issues will constitute a roiling, monthslong subplot of the 2024 presidential contest, one that remains, according to recent polling, a statistical dead heat between Trump and President Joe Biden and couldplausibly turn on the progress of Trump’s criminal cases before Election Day.

It is an unsettling, if not outright maddening, situation that should concern anyone who has watched the politicization and deterioration of the Court in recent years or who recalls its intervention in the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The uncertainty before us is the result of two ostensibly different problems that are converging before our eyes: the emergence of a solidly conservative majority on the Supreme Court, whose decisions often align with the partisan political priorities of the Republican Party, and the Justice Department’s needless delay in moving to investigate and prosecute Trump over his effort to steal the 2020 election.

The first big issue headed to the Court concerns Trump’s eligibility to run for president again under the 14th Amendment, which, according to recent decisions from Colorado’s top court and Maine’s secretary of State, precludes Trump’s reelection bid because he engaged in an “insurrection” following his 2020 loss to Biden. A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent weeks on this question, but as a practical matter, this was always an anti-Trump pipe dream that was essentially doomed to fail at the Supreme Court, and the fundamental legal hurdles have not changed since the effort began in earnest last year.

There are plenty of ways for a majority of the justices — perhaps even including one or more of the liberals — to reject the reasoning from Colorado’s and Maine’s officials and effectively clear the way for Trump to stand for reelection. Among other possibilities, they could conclude (1) that the relevant portion of the 14th Amendment does not apply to candidates for the presidency; (2) that the provision cannot be enforced without an enabling statute from Congress that specifies the procedure for disqualification; (3) that the provision was effectively nullified by Congress in the late 1800s; or (4) that Trump did not “engage” in an “insurrection” within the meaning of the amendment. These are each independently sufficient grounds to reject........

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