Might the US Supreme Court actually rule that Trump is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

So, with Colorado and Maine currently ruling that Donald Trump is in breach of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the dilemma which has probably been keeping the judiciary awake at night has finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court, as we probably all knew it would.

And, with three members of the Court owing their appointment to Donald Trump, the pressure upon them is probably greater than it has ever been. If you’re a partisan Democrat, do you really believe that Justices Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are impartial, or that Justice Thomas, whose wife is a high-profile proponent of the theory that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, could vote any other way than in favour of his wife’s bestest friend?

Partisan Republicans will assume that the perceived 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court will favour their man, but what if they don’t?

It would be a terrible situation for nine impartial judges, but when most, if not all, of the Justices are seen by a sizeable minority of the population as unreliable, if only because they don’t see the world in the same way, it is a recipe for the sort of reaction that the extremists, particularly hardcore Trump supporters, keep threatening.

I tend to the view that there’s enough “wriggle room” for the Justices to rule in favour of Trump, and that they’ll be extremely loathe to take such a conclusive step unless a lower court, probably Georgia, determines that his behaviour was such as to represent “insurrection or rebellion”, and even then they would bend over backwards not to exclude him.

What that tells you is that the bar for exclusion is a high one, as it probably should be, but it leaves space for extremists to push the boundaries ever further until, inevitably, the guardrails that protect American democracy break. As an outsider, that worries me, as a potentially fractured United States offers risks for allies and enemies alike.

It also raises questions about a multi-polar world where the United States becomes ever more insular and transactional in its relationships, whilst the European Union struggles to establish a consistent voice and Russia and China undermine the democracies at every turn.

We watch, nervously, for the Supreme Court…