The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, big surprise there, said today that ex-president Donald Trump, and ostensibly, all former presidents, present and future, have what is called “absolute immunity” from “official acts” taken in office.
The parlor trick here is, what are “official acts,” and how do we distinguish those from plain ol’ crimes?
“The president therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy or party,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The immediate impact here is on the ongoing cases involving the prosecution of Trump for the effort that he led to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the shameful display at the ceremonial Jan. 6 certification.
A Trump-incited mob overran the U.S. Capitol as the Senate voted to certify the election, delaying the action for several hours, which, we learned later, was part of a wide-reaching plan hatched by Trump’s inner circle to prevent Joe Biden from taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Trump is also facing criminal charges related to his move to take reams of top-secret documents with him upon leaving office and storing them at his Mar-a-Lago golf club, and casually disclosing their contents to friends and political confidants.
The cases have been delayed because of the effort by Trump and his lawyers to claim immunity, and will no doubt be delayed even further, at this no doubt well beyond the November general election, and if Trump, who is somehow his party’s nominee to run for a second term, despite his many legal issues, were to win, he could just order the Department of Justice to drop the charges upon taking office.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a scathing dissent, wrote that the court majority has effectively created a “law-free zone around the president,” and that the “relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably.”
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor wrote, adding: “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done.”
Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, a senior member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote on Twitter that the ruling is an indication that “American democracy is under homegrown attack.”
“The Supreme Court has yet again intervened to protect Donald J. Trump – a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and twice-impeached former President. This is a shameful decision, and one that will haunt us for years to come,” Connolly wrote.
Another Virginia House Democrat, Don Beyer, wrote on Twitter today that the ruling “corrupts and fundamentally alters the constitutional order designed by our Founders.”
“Every person in this country should and must be accountable to the law. We do not have kings in the United States of America,” Beyer wrote.
It should be noted that the Supreme Court ruling has no impact on the cases already adjudicated against Trump in New York state courts, which found the ex-president guilty of 34 counts of fraud related to his effort to cover up an affair with a porn star, and liable for more than half a billion dollars in civil judgments for business fraud and defamation of a journalist whom he sexually assaulted in the 1990s.
Another wrinkle here involves Trump’s ongoing threats of political retribution against Biden should Trump win the general election in November.
The same hazy standard laid out by the court majority in its opinion today that Trump is now claiming protects him from prosecution would obviously also apply to Biden, unless …
And I’m not going to be the one to suggest that the six-justice MAGA majority on the Supreme Court would reverse its own precedent out of political spite, but you can see where this can go.
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Chris Graham
