The United States Supreme Court is likely to rule that the Colorado Supreme court does not have the authority to decide this question. However it is a close question. SCOTUS, in the 1980s, decided that states could not enforce term limits on congressional candidates. They determined that states could not add eligibility requirements to candidates for federal office. I think that decision was wrong, and I think we'd be in a better place today if we actually let states experiment with these things, but SCOTUS would basically have to overturn that decision before they could let the Colorado case stand as written.

That said, the bigger part of the Colorado case is a "finding of fact" that Trump committed an insurrection. SCOTUS will have a hard time ignoring these findings. Trump told people that he knew or should have known were armed to go to the Capitol and then told them to "stay peaceful" after he already knew that they were not being peaceful and had breached the building. He violated section 3 of the 14th amendment, as a matter of fact. But that doesn't answer the questions of procedure and authority, which are just as important.

In one interpretation of the 14th amendment, the fact that he participated in insurrection is as plain and self executing as the fact that he is more than 35 years old and was born in the United States. This seems to be how the people who were alive when it was written felt, if you look at the Amnesty Act that they wrote later. But in another interpretation, section 3 can not execute itself and has to wait for Congress to pass a law, for a prosecutor to criminally charge Trump, and for a jury to convict before he can be removed from a ballot.

In the first interpretation, courts get to define "engaged in insurrection" for themselves. As Colorado just did. But in the second interpretation, section 3 is mostly redundant because before the 14th was passed Congress already had the authority to write criminal laws that would have the consequence of the loss of ability to run for office when a person was convicted. Congress didn't need that grant of authority.

So both interpretations are logical but both present problems. The Supreme Court of the United States should respect Colorado's finding of fact, and give Trump's lawyers one last chance to dispute it, then order that he be disqualified from all ballots in all states unless they are somehow persuaded on the facts. But it's more likely that they will find for the second interpretation, that no one can be disqualified from federal office except by impeachment or by jury conviction under a federal criminal statute.

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