After oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Trump v. Anderson, a grand bargain that appears to make practical sense as a compromise is beginning to come into view: The Supreme Court unanimously, or nearly so, holds that Colorado does not have the power to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, but in a separate case it rejects his immunity argument and makes Trump go on trial this spring or summer on federal election subversion charges. Depending upon how the court writes its opinion, however, it could leave the door open for chaos in January, if Donald Trump appears to win the 2024 election and a Democratic Congress rejects Electoral College votes for him on grounds he’s disqualified. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, however, may have seen this danger and found a way around it. If the court’s going to side with Trump in the disqualification case, it should embrace Justice Jackson’s rationale, even if it is not the most legally sound one.

Since the Colorado Supreme Court removed Trump from the ballot on grounds he engaged in insurrection, rendering him disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, most close observers of the U.S. Supreme Court expected a reversal: The idea that a single state could remove a leading presidential candidate from the ballot seemed both politically fraught and a bad political precedent.

It was clear from Tuesday’s oral arguments that many of the justices shared this view. Chief Justice John Roberts in particular was concerned about a race to the bottom in which Republican states try to take Joe Biden off the ballot and it becomes a kind of free-for-all. More liberal Justice Elena Kagan expressed a similar view about the unique federal interest in not leaving this to the states. Justice Amy Coney Barrett flagged the “first mover” problem, in which whatever state disqualifies first would make factual findings that would be binding on the nation. In fact, listening closely to the........

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