How in the world was President Trump able to figure out the 14th Amendment when it stymied some of the greatest minds in constitutional law? That’s the question that will confront voters in the face of the unanimous per curiam decision of the Nine in favor of the 45th president: How was he able to comprehend that the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court blocking him from its ballot was a jackleg, anti-constitutional piece of monkey business? 

Aye, there’s the poser. We press the point because of the statement from one of the proponents of disqualification, Ron Fein, of the liberal  legal group, Free Speech for People. As our A.R. Hoffman notes, he called the court’s decision “disgraceful” and “dangerous.” He accused the Supreme Court of having “made a mockery” of the Constitution. It doesn’t look to us like that’s what has been made a mockery here.

Mr. Trump, himself, took to Truth Social to call the ruling a — in the typical tone of voice in his legal work — “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” The case was certainly decided at the constitutional quick. The Nine write that  states “may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.” The italics are ours.

This happy division is what Chief Justice Rehnquist once called elsewhere, with satisfaction, “our federalism.” The current justices warn that if states could go rogue and apply disqualification according to their own peculiar processes, the result would be an “evolving electoral map” and a “patchwork.” This would in turn “dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times.”

Nothing in the Constitution, they assert, “requires that we endure such chaos.” The disqualification campaign, which our Mr. Hoffman has been reporting from its first rumblings, has already sown much chaos, with rulings rendering  Mr. Trump ineligible from the ballot in Illinois, Maine, and Colorado. Those are all now undone. Word that “all nine Members of the Court agree with that result” is especially striking given the court’s persistent fractures.

That, Justice Amy Coney Barrett writes, “is the message Americans should take home.” This all strikes us as apt. No federal court has ruled that an insurrection occurred, and not one person has been charged with that crime in respect of January 6. The closest anyone has come to facing an insurrection rap is Mr. Trump himself, and he was discovered by the Senate to be not guilty. Now the court has ruled that it is the part of Congress to disqualify a president.                  

Which brings us back to Mr. Trump, constitutionalist. There are those who doubt as to the 45th president’s grasp of the finer points of the parchment. He once stumbled over the opening words of Article 2, where the presidency is created and, uniquely in our system of separated powers, 100 percent of the executive powers of the United States are vested in a single individual. He likened the constitutional lingo to a “foreign language.”

Yet he gambled everything on a careful reading of the 14th Amendment. It’s unclear whether in his coming cases — such as the one dealing with presidential immunities — he will win a victory as famous as this one. We’d like to think, though, that today’s decision will, at least for a few days, quiet the sneering of his constant detractors. The immunity questions, after all, are every bit as important to the presidency as the issue just vindicated by Mr. Trump.