Now, the Colorado Supreme Court has gone and used the conservatives’ own obsession with states’ rights against them. Literally. The court quoted Justice Neil Gorsuch in an election law opinion from when he was a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which oversees Colorado. Back then, Gorsuch wrote that “a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process…permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”

The case that line comes from, Hassan v. Colorado, is directly on point with the Trump case. In that case, a man named Abdul Karim Hassan wanted to run for president. Hassan was a naturalized citizen, but the Constitution says that only “natural born” citizens are eligible to become president. A judge in Colorado ruled that Hassan could not be placed on the ballot in the state because he could not assume office if elected.

Hassan sued. Hassan lost, with Neil Gorsuch explaining that Colorado was perfectly allowed to exclude people from the ballot who would be ineligible under a strict textual reading of the Constitution to hold office. I’m sure it must be annoying for Neil to have his own xenophobic, literalistic ruling spit back in his face.

Annoying, but not insurmountable. Despite the fact that the text of the law, conservative ideology, and some of the justices’ own words are on the side of Colorado in this case, I fully expect the Republicans on the Supreme Court to ignore all that and restore Trump to the Colorado ballot. You see, the problem with beating conservatives at their own game is that they don’t care about their own rules. It’s easy for them to make up new rules that contradict the old ones, as they go along, because they are not bound by principle. They’re only concerned about power.

There are many ways the conservatives can wriggle out of their own ideology now that their so-called logic no longer helps them. Perhaps they’ll read “convicted” of insurrection into the amendment, even though that word doesn’t exist in the text. Perhaps they’ll say that the case is not “ripe”—which in legalese means that the case is not ready for the court to make a ruling on—because it deals only with the primary ballots and not the general election ballots. Perhaps they’ll say we’re “too close” to an election to follow the rules (they’ve done that before).

The easiest thing for the Supreme Court to dispute might be whether Section 3 is “self-executing”—which is a technical legal question the Colorado Supreme Court devoted a lot of time to in its opinion. Some constitutional amendments or clauses require an act of Congress before they’re “executed” or, in other words, become real law. My favorite example of this is Prohibition. The 18th Amendment gave Congress the authority to prohibit alcohol, but that authority didn’t mean anything until the passage of the Volstead Act. It was the Volstead Act, not the 18th Amendment, that defined what Prohibition was, what was banned, who could be punished for drinking, and how.

Other amendments are “self-executing” in that they don’t need acts of Congress to make them real. The 13th Amendment, for instance, did not require the passage of a national anti-slavery act. Instead, once the 13th Amendment was ratified, slavery was illegal (but big ups to Ulysses S. Grant for actually enforcing the thing).

In this case, the Colorado Supreme Court says that the 14th Amendment is like the 13th: Congress doesn’t need to pass a law defining insurrection or specifying who gets kicked off the ballot; it simply prohibits insurrectionists from returning to office. That makes sense when you look at the history of the 14th Amendment, and the other Reconstruction Amendments, taken as a whole. But Trump’s lawyer argued, and the Supreme Court could agree, that Section 3 requires a specific act of Congress before it can be enforced. That might be a cute way for the court to stand by their man and let Trump get back on the ballot, while pretending that it’s all Congress’s fault.

Most likely, the conservatives will just adopt some garbled amalgam of all of those arguments to restore Trump back to the ballot. That’s basically what the conservatives on the court did in Bush v. Gore. In that case, in which the Supreme Court anointed George W. Bush president on its own authority instead of following the state law in Florida and counting all the votes, there was no real conservative through-line. They just said a bunch of stuff to justify their sudden abandonment of states’ rights to make sure that Republicans took control of the White House.

However they do it, I seriously doubt that they will stand on their textualist and states’ rights principles and allow Colorado to disqualify Trump from the ballot. Indeed, if they do, then lawsuits pending against Trump in many other states would suddenly take on new life. The Republicans on the Supreme Court don’t want that smoke.

The conservatives will likely kill this, quickly, in the next few weeks. They will look bad doing it, but they’re appointed for life and know that elected Democrats lack the will to police their conduct. The main upshot will likely be that the staff at Mar-a-Lago has to clean a lot of ketchup off the walls during this holiday season.

That said, perhaps since it’s the holidays, I’m still guilty of believing there is a chance the Supreme Court sides with Colorado. There’s a chance that Gorsuch listens to himself. There’s a chance that Roberts’s political preferences are such that he understands the grave threat a second Trump presidency poses to the country and the Supreme Court’s own power. It’s a fool’s chance, but I choose to believe that there’s a chance that the law prevails over Trump.

There is probably a universe out there where Trump is kicked off the ballot; it’s just unlikely that we’re lucky enough to live in that one.