In a move without parallel in American history, the Supreme Court agreed on Friday evening to examine Donald Trump’s claim that the Constitution does not bar him from again seeking the Presidency.

While the Court’s one-page order gave no reliable hint of how the case would come out in the end, two things stood out immediately:

1. By scheduling review by the normal though expedited process, with written briefs and a public hearing, the Court – by implication – turned aside Trump’s plea that it act without those formalities: In short, it refused to rule summarily in his favor.
2. By agreeing to consider only Trump’s appeal, and taking no action on a separate appeal by his Republican Party supporters in Colorado, the Justices appeared to be intent on focusing only on the question of a candidate’s eligibility, not the rights of political parties to pick their candidates.

Because the Trump appeal reaches the Court through the normal appeals process, the Justices had complete discretion to bypass or grant review.  Now that they have taken the case for review, here are the options open to it:

1. It could dismiss the appeal after review, leaving intact the Colorado Supreme Court decision that Trump challenged, which would keep him off the presidential primary election ballot in Colorado but not affect directly Trump’s candidacy in any other state.
2. It could decide only some of the seven separate claims that Trump’s lawyers appeared to have spelled out in his appeal (the appeal papers did not list just what they wanted the Court to consider other than whether the Colorado court had decided wrongly).
3. It could rule for him or against him, on any or all issues that it believed required an answer.
4. It could issue a partial ruling, and then send the case back to Colorado courts for further examination.
5. It could even decide that the Colorado court ruling was, in reality, based solely on state law in Colorado, which would be beyond the Supreme Court’s power to review.

It was important, both legally and symbolically, that the Court arranged an unusually speedy review of Trump’s appeal.  It allowed only one month for all the briefs to be filed and it set a public hearing on the case for Thursday, February 8.  Normally, lawyers have 100 or so days to file briefs between the time the Justices agree to hear a case and then hold a hearing on it.

By the schedule it arranged, the Court allowed for the possibility that it might rule before Trump is scheduled to go on trial in Washington, D.C., on March 4.

The four criminal charges against him in that case are based on prosecutors’ claims that he played a central role in instigating and failing to stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, three years ago tomorrow.

That uprising is at the core of a ruling last month by the Colorado Supreme Court that Trump is constitutionally unqualified to hold the office of President.   The state court ruled that Trump had engaged in an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.  That was an interpretation of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment – never before used to exclude a major presidential candidate from running.

The Court might even reach a decision on the constitutional controversy over his candidacy even before it has a chance to review his separate argument that he had absolute immunity to being prosecuted on any criminal charges based on his conduct while serving in the White House.  A federal appeals court in Washington is to hold a hearing on that argument January 9.  That court could rule promptly on the immunity issue, but maybe not in time for a decision by the Justices prior to the trial date in Washington of March 4.

The Court’s order granting review of Trump’s appeal did not reveal how any of the Justices had voted on that question.  It never discloses those votes.  It would have taken the votes of only four of the nine Justices to agree to hear the case.  It will take the votes of five Justices to decide the case.

The order also gave no indication that any of the nine Justices had chosen not to participate in the action.  If any had done so, that would have been noted in the order.  Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Virginia, had played a prominent role in some of the events related to the January 6 incident, had recently been challenged by a group of Democratic members of Congress not to take part in the Trump case.

The case is expected to draw a huge stack of legal briefs arguing both sides of Trump’s eligibility under the 14^th Amendment.  That Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, specifies that any federal officer who had taken an oath to defend the Constitution cannot seek any public office if they had later engaged in insurrection or rebellion.

Legal scholars have been debating the meaning of that constitutional clause at lease since last summer, and since then, the issue has been raised in state courts in at least 15 states.  The Colorado case was the first in which a state Supreme Court had ruled that Trump had violated that clause, and thus was disqualified from holding the Presidency, or running for it.  The Maine Secretary of State has now ruled the same way.

It could be a factor in the Supreme Court’s review of the dispute that much of the scholarship on the 14^th Amendment clause has been produced by deeply conservative academics, whose work might well be found persuasive by the Supreme Court’s dominant bloc of six conservatives.  The Court might also be impressed by the fact that a former federal judge with strong conservative credentials, former appeal judge J. Michael Luttig, has been a strong supporter of applying the 14^th Amendment clause to bar Donald Trump’s candidacy.

(NOTE TO READERS:  Tomorrow, the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, an article will appear in this space analyzing all of the controversies now before the Supreme Court (or on the way there) based on that attack.)