The filing of a brief to the Supreme Court authored by four of America’s preeminent historians — including a former president of Harvard, Drew Faust — arguing that President Trump does not belong on the 2024 ballot under the terms of Section Three of the 14th Amendment could catch the eyes of justices set to hear arguments on the blockbuster case. 

The four academics — a stalwart of the New Yorker, Harvard’s Jill Lepore, Ms. Faust, and Yale’s David Blight and John Fabian Witt — have between them enough prizes to fill a faculty lounge. They begin their amicus brief by telling the Nine that they are all “elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and winners of either the Pulitzer or the Bancroft Prize or both.” 

These worthies have put pen to paper to “assist the Court by establishing the original intent, meaning, and public understanding of the Disqualification Clause,” which bars from the ballot anyone who swears to defend the Constitution and then is found to have “engaged in insurrection.” The case will be heard next month before the court because the supreme court of Colorado, by a 4-to-3 vote, found that the clause bans Mr. Trump. 

The professors concur with the razor-thin Rocky Mountain majority. They venture that to the framers of the amendment, “anything short of the disqualification of insurrectionists” would have risked “surrendering the government to anti-Constitutionalist rebels.” They find that the clause applies “automatically,” that it applies to the president, and that it binds not only those on the wrong side of the Civil War but also those who participate in “future insurrections.”

Ms. Faust et al write: “After Appomattox, Congress determined to use its power to bring order from chaos. This meant, by design and necessity, the creation of civil and political rights for the freed people, the disqualification of former rebels, and the prevention of future insurrections.” The brief lauds the Disqualification Clause as having “strengthened and extended” the “security of the republic.” 

The brief situates the Disqualification Clause as a bulwark against the then “emerging ideology of the Lost Cause.” The scholars see disqualification as the center of a “new Constitution, a new kind of federalism, a commitment to equality before the law, and a method to guarantee the essential results of the Civil War.”

Chiding supporters of Mr. Trump’s position as “individuals who are not historians,” the professors aver that the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, “stood as the cautionary tale through which Congress and the public understood Section Three.” While Davis was charged with treason, he was never tried, in large part because of fear of what an acquittal would mean. The brief argues that Section Three was a fallback lest he run again. 

The Davis precedent is an important one because Mr. Trump argues — he filed his brief to the Nine last week — that Section Three does not apply to the president, who is not, in the telling of the 45th president, among others, an “officer” of the United States. He can point to, among other places, the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which ordains that the president shall appoint “all other Officers of the United States,” suggesting that he is not himself one of them.

A Colorado district court judge, Sarah Wallace, agreed with that interpretation, ruling that the disqualification effort failed because the president is not an “officer” of the United States. She, though, was reversed by Colorado’s highest court. Two other distinguished sages, Joshua Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman, have themselves filed a brief with the court arguing that “since the Framing, prominent jurists have maintained that the phrase ‘Officers of the United States’ in the Constitution does not refer to the President.”   

These historians, though, align with Colorado’s highest court  in maintaining that the president is an “officer of the United States.” Their rationale  is rooted not in legal wrangling  but instead in a sense of the Reconstruction amenders as “haunted by the nation’s suffering and fearful of disloyalty and ongoing political violence.”