July 01, 2024 11:26 AM UTC

United States Supreme Court Takes a Dump on the Republic

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• by: Colorado Pols

Nothing quite says, “Happy Birthday, America” like opening the door to turning the United States into a dictatorship.

The conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court used the opportunity of the week of America’s birthday to award “Presidential immunity” to whomever occupies the top elected office in the land. The Washington Post explains a complicated but absolutely terrifying ruling:

Former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions taken while in the White House, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, but do not have immunity for unofficial acts — a broad new definition of presidential power that may stand for generations and will likely mean more months of delay for Donald Trump’s pending election-interference trial. [Pols emphasis]

The 6-3 decision along ideological lines appears to rule out one set of allegations in Trump’s federal election-interference trial, involving his conversations with Justice Department officials after Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and signals other parts of the case against him may proceed only after additional lower court rulings.

It seems highly unlikely that the 45th president will go to trial on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election before voters cast ballots in this year’s presidential contest, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, a president “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.”

But Roberts added, the president “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law.” [Pols emphasis]

Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority are no doubt repeating this excuse in their heads even as we write, but it’s a nonsense statement. For all intents and purposes, any President is basically now above the law now, protected from prosecution by a dictionary. As long as you can make even the most ridiculous of arguments that a presidential action was “official,” then the President can do pretty much anything.

The ruling feels like a ‘thank you’ card to former President Donald Trump for helping to ensure the right-wing MAGA majority on the highest court in the land. The three Justices appointed by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — joined with Robert and conservatives Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in crafting a virtual “get out of jail free” card for Trump. Many legal experts said that Alito and Thomas probably should have recused themselves from the case, given that their spouses very publicly supported the January 6, 2021 insurrection that was largely what this case was about.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the case known as Trump v. United States, with Sotomayor authoring a blistering opposition. Via The New York Times:

Writing that the majority was “deeply wrong,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor added that beyond its consequences for the bid to prosecute Mr. Trump for his attempt to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, it would have “stark” long-term consequences for the future of American democracy.

“The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding,” she wrote, in an opinion joined by the other two Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Insulating the president of the United States — the most powerful person in the country and possibly the world, she noted — from criminal prosecution when he uses his official powers will allow him to freely use his official power to violate the law, exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, or other “evil ends.”

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” she wrote, adding: “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably.” [Pols emphasis]

Justice Sotomayor also wrote that how the majority had applied the new standard of immunity to official acts to Mr. Trump’s case specifically was “perhaps even more troubling.” Its analysis, she added, operated as a “one-way ratchet” — helping the defense but offering no help to the prosecution.

For example, she wrote, the majority declared that all of Mr. Trump’s actions involving Vice President Mike Pence and the Justice Department counted as official conduct but did not designate any actions in the indictment as falling into the non-“core” category of official conduct that it said could be prosecuted. Nor did it designate as clearly private actions any of several things that Mr. Trump’s team had conceded looked unofficial, like Mr. Trump’s interactions with a personal lawyer…

…Sometimes justices conclude their dissents with a softening and polite qualifier, writing “Respectfully, I dissent.” Justice Sotomayor instead concluded this one harshly: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” [Pols emphasis]

This is the part where we remind you, once again, that elections matter.

They matter a great deal.

And there may truly be no more important election than the one this November — which could put Donald Trump back in the White House with a license to basically do whatever he wants.