Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a momentous case: whether former President Donald Trump can be removed from state ballots under the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment for having “engaged in insurrection.” The question is unprecedented, and the high court (and the public) may or may not agree with the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualification of the former president. But there should be no disagreement about this: Pressing the question is not “antithetical” to democracy, as former Vice President Mike Pence said on Sunday. Rather, it is in the best tradition of American democracy to ask if the Constitution applies here—and to enforce it if it does.

The Colorado courts found that Trump’s role in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol constituted engaging in insurrection under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Indeed, every judicial fact finder to reach the question has agreed, including the Maine secretary of state, and a majority of the House and Senate concluded Trump incited the insurrection. They are in our view correct: As we have explained in our scholarship, Jan. 6 was an insurrection, Trump was a central part of it, and so the law and the facts clearly favor disqualification.

Those conclusions are hardly partisan; in fact, leading conservative legal scholars and lawyers applying traditionally conservative tools of interpretation have provided the intellectual foundations for disqualification. They have persuasively demonstrated that Section 3 applies to the presidency and is self-executing and thus does not require congressional action for enforcement.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and upheld Colorado’s decision to prohibit a non-natural-born citizen from the presidential ballot, states have a “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.” Originalism, textualism, states’ rights—these are the bedrock principles of the conservative legal movement, and these approaches all suggest that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump. Justice Gorsuch and his colleagues on the Supreme Court will now have to resolve these pointed legal issues.

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