Attempts to keep Trump off the ballot were ludicrous. So are his claims of unchecked immunity.

As the current electoral cycle winds on, there are already too many instances of tribalist insanity to list, but two stand out: one wielded against former President Donald Trump, and one wielded by him. The U.S. Supreme Court has already disposed of the first and will, I suspect, dismiss the second just as summarily.

The first case was decided last week, as the court issued a unanimous verdict overturning the Colorado Supreme Court and declaring that states may not unilaterally determine which presidential candidates are allowed on the ballot and which are barred as “insurrectionists” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Some of the justices would have ruled more narrowly than others, but all nine agreed that Colorado’s actions were out of bounds.

This was the final chapter in the weird life of a fringe theory that has been working its way through the political fever swamps and legal academia for several years now. As I wrote last year on the subject, proponents of this theory “claim Section 3 is ‘self-executing’ and waive away the only case on point (which says the opposite) as ‘poorly reasoned.’ This gets us fully out of the legal mainstream and into hot-take territory.”

» READ MORE: Why efforts to keep Trump off primary ballots defy every principle of democracy | Kyle Sammin

There were some big names attached to the idea, including former federal judge J. Michael Luttig — a noted conservative — and law professor Laurence H. Tribe — a liberal. But that appeal to authority doesn’t make the case any stronger, just more likely to get published in the Atlantic. The case was always weak and poorly reasoned. People gravitated to it only because they believed the end — keeping Trump out of the White House — justified the means.

That’s not good enough.

As Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “Allowing Colorado to do so would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles.” The problems were obvious, and the interpretation was at odds with a normal reading of the Constitution. The justices were right to slap it down.

Short-term solutions that threaten long-term calamity are common enough in the political realm, where everyone is laser-focused on winning the next election and any trade-offs are a problem for future politicians. (Prime example: our national debt — $34 trillion and growing.) The court, though, is supposed to take the long view and rule in accordance with what the law says, not what they or their political allies wish it to say. Often, courts fall short of this lofty goal, but this time, they stayed true to their judicial oaths and to the Constitution.

The next test is similar but from the other side of the political aisle.

Next month, the court will hear an appeal on Trump’s assertion of possessing presidential immunity from prosecution. The claim stems from the pending case against the former president involving charges that he worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump contends that his actions as president are not subject to court review and that making them reviewable — allowing prosecutors to charge him for anything he did while in office — would make it impossible for the executive to act. “Without immunity from criminal prosecution,” his lawyers say, “the presidency as we know it will cease to exist.”

It is not crazy to say that there must be some presidential immunity — having the judiciary second-guess everything the president does would upend the separation of powers and transfer control of the government to an unelected branch. But what is ludicrous is how far Trump and his lawyers would take this idea: They claim that former presidents are owed complete and total immunity “for any act conceivably within the outer perimeter of his executive responsibility.”

In essence, the president would be immune to prosecution for anything.

» READ MORE: Between Biden’s baggage and Trump’s indictments, the country needs a fresh start | Kyle Sammin

Presidential immunity, as the appeals court acknowledged, is mostly undefined as a legal matter, but never has a court held that it would extend to cover alleged crimes committed by a president (they have held that presidents are immune to civil damages from official acts in office). It is a sweeping claim with no source in the text or precedents of the Constitution, a strained reading that (again) only makes sense to people intensely focused on one result: getting their candidate elected — and to hell with the consequences.

The consequences, of course, would be dire. A president with complete immunity from criminal penalties is a dictator — there is no other word for it. Such an executive would be above the law, something unknown in the history of the American republic. If the court upheld such a claim, what would stop Joe Biden from settling the election right now with a drone strike on Mar-a-Lago?

That’s absurd, of course — the president is not going to order the assassination of an American citizen. But if Trump’s legal theory were the law, there would be nothing we could do about it except to impeach him, and no penalty except to remove him from office. That is a ridiculous and ahistorical result.

The court will strike down this massive attempted power grab and, I believe, will again do so unanimously. That, combined with the resolution of the 14th Amendment case, would send a signal to the people that there are limits to how insane our political frenzy will be allowed to get, and that the court — liberals and conservatives acting together — will enforce those norms.

They must because no one else will.