Will presidents be kings? The Supreme Court seems to be leaning that way.

The Supreme Court issued its ruling on Monday in the Colorado disqualification case, siding with Donald Trump and holding that future insurrections by incumbent presidents, presidential candidates and other officials who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution are perfectly okay under that Constitution, unless Congress enacts legislation specifically activating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Last week, the court agreed to consider Trump’s effort to manufacture constitutional criminal immunity to insulate his January 6, 2021, actions from the purview of the law. By accepting Trump’s immunity appeal, at least five justices appear to be toying with the idea of carving out some safe space for presidential criminal activity — which does not currently exist under the law in any way.

The Supreme Court did not have to hear these cases. But now, having taken Trump’s bait, the justices must put country over party and reject the sobering implications of enabling the criminal use of a president’s extraordinary powers with impunity.

Armed with rulings green-lighting Trump’s Jan. 6 actions, it’s hard to say what would stop a future president from using the powers of the executive to stay in power indefinitely. He might employ the military in contravention of the Insurrection Act — a maneuver Trump reportedly considered in 2020 — and would be sure to appoint military commanders willing to carry out his demands through pledges of personal fealty. To get around Senate confirmation hiccups, he could try to make the appointments during a Senate recess under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, or adjourn both houses of Congress “to such Time as he shall think proper” under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, “in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment.” (Trump threatened to invoke this provision while president, too.)

With a newly-minted doctrine of criminal immunity, a future president might be emboldened to employ the country’s intelligence apparatus to spy on, intimidate or criminally frame critics; accept bribes for government favors or sell nuclear or other national-security secrets; commit financial and retributory crimes in his own self-interest; crack down on dissenting voices through sham investigations, prosecutions and law enforcement or military force; or even aid adverse foreign powers in exchange for money and international influence. What’s left to stop him — Congress?

As I argued two years ago, the Trump years demonstrated that a felony conviction is probably the only surviving mechanism for dissuading malevolent presidents from turning America into a dictatorship. The justices’ latest maneuver regarding immunity now means that the Jan. 6 prosecution might not go to trial before the election. If Trump wins the election, he will likely cancel the case and, if we take him at his word, use the Justice Department’s powers for revenge prosecutions.

The justices must ask themselves whether blessing the actions of Donald Trump “reduces to nothing what we have deemed the greatest improvement on political institutions, a written constitution,” in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in the groundbreaking case Marbury v. Madison. Marshall’s own actions in Marbury tell a tale of fidelity to the Constitution that the modern justices should heed.

John Marshall was secretary of state under President John Adams, who lost reelection in 1800 to Thomas Jefferson. Before Jefferson took office, Adams nominated Marshall for chief justice, and he assumed that post while still serving in Adams’s Cabinet. Meanwhile, the lame-duck, pro-Adams Congress passed a law authorizing the appointment of 42 justices of the peace in the District of Columbia. The Senate approved Adams’s appointments, but they were not valid until the secretary of state also acted.

In his capacity as secretary of state, Marshall delivered the commissions to Adams’s appointees, but four of the men — including William Marbury — had not received theirs by the time Jefferson assumed office. Jefferson then directed his new secretary of state, James Madison, to withhold the delivery to Marbury. Marbury sued, and Marshall sat to decide the case.

Despite his conflict of interest, Justice Marshall wrote an opinion holding that the Supreme Court was powerless to do anything to help Marbury. Politically, this meant that Marshall ruled against his former boss, John Adams, and his Federalist Party, to whom he owed his Supreme Court job.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court must likewise put political allegiances aside by hewing to the Constitution and the system of laws it establishes for everyone, including presidents.

The justices already know this. In a 1998 law review article, Brett Kavanaugh, years before he became a judge, wrote that “if Congress declines to investigate, or to impeach and remove the President, there can be no criminal prosecution of the President at least until his term in office expires.” (Emphasis added.) Kavanaugh reiterated during his Senate confirmation that “no one is above the law,” even calling United States v. Nixon, the 1974 case forcing President Richard Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tapes in a criminal prosecution, “one of the greatest moments in American judicial history.” (Nixon made executive privilege arguments similar to those Trump makes now.)

At his confirmation hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch likewise said that “nobody is above the law in this country, and that includes the president of the United States.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett made similar assertions at their confirmations.

In 1988’s Morrison v. Olson, Chief Justice William Rehnquist upheld the constitutionality of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 over separation of powers objections. (Later, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr used the same law to investigate President Bill Clinton in office.) In his dissenting opinion in Morrison, Justice Antonin Scalia argued in defense of the presidency: “How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile.” Scalia was apparently unmoved to caution that presidents and former presidents are textually immune from prosecution — because no such immunity has ever existed under the law.

If the justices vote to put presidents above the criminal laws on the heels of Trump’s Section 3 win, they will be inviting both violence around contested elections and crimes in the Oval Office. What’s good for Trump is good for future presidents. Who knows — by continuing to reward his behavior, the justices might even make themselves irrelevant. Then presidents will be kings, after all.

Kimberly Wehle is a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of “How to Read the Constitution — and Why.” Her forthcoming book, “Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works – and Why,” is out in September. Follow her @kimwehle.