Their all-out and lawless opinions have almost reached their peak. trump vs usaDonald Trump's lawyers on the Supreme Court repeat one of the most basic tenets of American constitutional government: “The president is not above the law.” Then they destroy it.
Pro-Trump judges attempt to enshrine the breadth of their opinions into legal language, but find that a president cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” and that much of Trump's efforts to seize power fall within legal language. The judges essentially made it legal for a losing president to refuse to resign, as Trump attempted to do after the 2020 election.
The court's opinion presents an absurd paradox that undermines the purpose of a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law. It has little basis in the Constitution or the words of the Founding Fathers. It is an outcome that is most beneficial to the court's favored presidential candidate, but the justices can forgive themselves for having desecrated the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination beyond recognition.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor made this clear in her dissenting opinion. In response to the question “whether a former president enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor responded, “The majority believes he should, so they have created an ungrammatical, unhistorical and unjustifiable immunity that places the president above the law.” “I wrote. The point is this:
Citing Trump’s plan to fabricate a voter fraud indictment as a pretext to overturn his 2020 election loss, the court wrote that “since the President cannot be indicted for acts performed within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged acts related to his discussions with Justice Department officials.” That refers to discussions in which Trump, after being warned by his own advisers that his voter fraud claims were unfounded, told the Justice Department, “Just tell them the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Rep. R.” according to a Justice Department official’s account at the time.
Throughout the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts often makes himself sound more like Trump's lawyer than an impartial judge. “With respect to the President’s exercise of core constitutional powers, these exemptions must be absolute,” Roberts wrote. If this applies, as the court argues, to a sitting president scheming to avoid relinquishing power after losing an election, then there is no legal constraint on a president simply refusing to leave office and using his power to find an excuse to do so. . We can discuss the nuances of history, the intentions of the framers, and the text of the Constitution. What America's founders did not intend when they designed our constitutional system of checks and balances was to create a government that would allow someone to declare themselves president for life if they wanted to.
The courts write that a president cannot be prosecuted for ‘using’ his official powers, but what this really means is that he cannot be prosecuted for his blatant abuse. This belies the clear disclaimer on which the opinion that the President is not above the law is based. More importantly, this opinion rests on the implicit belief that the only person who would act so brazenly is Trump, and that he should be protected from prosecution because the majority of the court's judges support Trump and want him to be president. In this implicit way, Trump's judges acknowledge that he poses a unique threat to constitutional government. They just happened to support Trump because he is someone they like. These are not judges. These are Trump's associates. This is not legal reasoning. This is vandalism.
Like many of this court's opinions, this decision addresses radicalism under the guise of theft. That means the president can be accused of “unofficial” conduct. And yet the president escapes prosecution for the most egregious abuses of power imaginable. The court rejected President Trump's argument that a former president must be impeached and convicted before being indicted, and proposed a standard that would make it impossible for a president seeking to seize power to be indicted.
“It can be difficult to distinguish between a president’s formal and informal actions,” Roberts wrote. He then makes matters more difficult by writing, “In distinguishing between official and unofficial conduct, courts cannot examine the president’s motives.”
Here’s the idea: By balancing all the possible charges against this distinction, and then making that distinction virtually indistinguishable, Roberts eliminates the possibility of solving the fundamental legal problem with Trump’s current federal indictment before he has a chance to regain power. If Trump wins, he could swing the sword of “absolute immunity” the court has provided to dismiss the criminal investigation against him. “The majority draws a line between ‘official’ and ‘informal’ conduct, thereby virtually nullifying what counts as ‘informal,’” Sotomayor writes.
Lifetime appointments mean that Supreme Court justices can do whatever they want when they have a majority. When judges tried to force Colorado to return President Trump to the presidential ballot after the state concluded that Trump's attempt to seize power on Jan. 6 prevented him from holding public office under the 14th Amendment, they did so as little as possible. It moved quickly. They took their time when they wanted to support Trump's strategy to delay possible federal trials.
These efforts are inconsistent with the idea that the judges are impartial. By now, it should be clear that this is a fiction. The current composition of the court is the result of decades of right-wing activists seeking permanent conservative political supremacy, and the actions of the majority consistently reflect that goal. Like other right-wing institutions, this institution has been thoroughly corrupted by its subservience to the Republican leadership, the principle to which all others now submit. This is not a Republican court, but a Trump court.
Trump’s argument was, on its face, absurd: that former presidents are immune from prosecution for any crimes committed in the name of the law unless impeached and convicted. The core logic of the argument, that the president’s powers grant him some immunity for certain acts, was stretched beyond recognition to make Trump immune from prosecution.
According to the obvious hypothetical often raised by critics, this means that a president can avoid impeachment and thus remain permanently immune from prosecution by assassinating a rival in the name of national security and then threatening to kill a member of Congress as well. The ruling supports the doomsday scenario, in which if by some miracle a president is removed from office for murdering a political enemy, prosecutors will not only be unable to try him, but will also be unable to use his conversations with executive branch officials as evidence against him.
“He will now be immune from criminal prosecution by the majority’s reasoning if he uses his official power in any way,” Sotomayor wrote. “Order Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent? Immune. Organize a military coup to stay in power? Immune. Take a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Trump’s court decision is not just a cover-up for his actions since the 2020 election. This ruling should be understood as a license to the dictatorial powers that Trump will claim if he is re-elected. This is not simply a grant of immunity for past crimes, but an enthusiastic endorsement of the crimes he will commit if given the chance. President Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one” and vowed to “avenge” his political opponents. Right-wing think tanks are planning to fill the federal government with loyal cronies who will protect and enrich Trump and give him enormous power to impose his extreme agenda without legal restraint.
With this ruling, the court says Trump is entitled to immunity from prosecution for crimes he has already committed and for crimes he may commit in the future. The entire purpose of the Constitution was to create a government not subject to the whims of the king. The court's self-described “originalists” have twisted history and the Constitution they cherish to place the crown within Trump's reach in the hopes that he can get it in November.