oxygenOn July 1, 2024, after an unreasonable delay of half a year (ridiculously described as “expedited” treatment), the U.S. Supreme Court issued an immunity ruling in the Trump v. United States case, treating the President of the United States as ” Branch,” thereby placing the President of the United States above the law. Government…is not like other people. ” The court’s delay ensures that Donald Trump will face voters in 2024 without first facing a jury of his peers who will decide whether he is guilty of trying to overturn the 2020 election. Inform voters.
Famous Irish immigrant Thomas Paine advocated that we rebel against the crown, establish an independent nation, and create a constitution to prevent the rise of a dictator “who would exploit the unrest of the people and bring together the desperate and disaffected.” …. [and] Freedom that swept across the continent like a flood”. To this end, Paine asked, “Where is the King of the United States…?” He replied, “In America, the law is king. For as in a despotic government the king is the law, so in a free state the law should be the king. And should nothing else.
In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. betrayed that promise and the Constitution that embodies it. He pretended that granting lifetime immunity from liability under state criminal laws did not make the president “above the law.” He declared, in a solemn circular fashion, that “the President is not above the law” because such immunity is implicit in the law itself to preserve “the basic structure of the Constitution from which it is derived.”
But the idea that we need an unrestricted executive to make the separation of powers work has neither theoretical nor empirical basis, and contradicts the axiom of checks and balances. To make matters worse, the court’s decision does not result in truly unfettered enforcement but is subject to whatever limitations the court itself invents as it fills in the gray areas of a black-and-white ruling. The Court thus provides an imperial judicial body in the name of the Imperial Executive, which is not surprising for a Court that last week dismantled the administrative state by replacing itself with a whole host of specialist administrative agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo.
The three dissenting justices argued, uncontested by the majority, that no previous president had needed this novel immunity from generally applicable criminal law to serve as “a dynamic, independent executive. personnel” operation, and the courts place this goal at the forefront. A majority expressed concern that “the executive branch will cannibalize itself, with each successive president free to prosecute his predecessor but unable to carry out his duties boldly and fearlessly for fear that he may be next.” But it says little to justify such concerns — nor to explain how the newly enacted, less absolute presidential immunity is expected to solve the problems it poses. After all, if we elect unprincipled presidents who direct attorneys general to persecute their predecessors on trumped-up charges of abuse of official power, there’s nothing to stop them from fabricating purely personal incidents — and, under the court’s new rules , they are not immune either.
In addition to those glaring flaws in the majority’s reasoning, Roberts sarcastically accused the three dissenting justices of “spreading fear based on extreme assumptions” that neither the majority nor the two concurrings bothered to rebut.
What to make of the majority’s confusing directive to the courts to try Trump for federal crimes by which he allegedly sought to overturn the 2020 election and the first legitimate transfer of power in our history? Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett, concurring in part and dissenting in part, wrote in no uncertain terms what the majority should have made clear but did not: “The President’s alleged attempt to organize a replacement slate of electors… is private conduct, and therefore is not entitled to protection…While Congress has a limited role in this process (see Article II, Section 1, Sections 3-4), the President has no role. In short, the President has no legal power— There is therefore no official ability to influence how states appoint electors. Most should agree with Barrett’s flippant conclusion: “I don’t see any legitimate reason to prevent prosecution of this alleged conduct. “
The majority also offered no compelling reason to reject Barrett’s argument that “beyond the limits provided by executive privilege” the U.S. Constitution does not “limit the introduction of protected conduct as evidence in a criminal prosecution of the President.” . As she and the three dissenters argued convincingly, the Constitution “does not require juries to turn a blind eye to circumstances for conduct for which the president may be liable,” even if it does shield the president from prosecution for those circumstances. Bribery is a federal crime and illustrates this perfectly. Like most people, it is absurd to think that a president performing an official act such as pardoning himself in exchange for a bribe could be prosecuted for bribery but might prevent a jury from understanding the president’s behind-the-scenes conversations surrounding the pardon. Most counter that the pardon itself can be used as evidence in the official record, but that is not the answer at all.
In fact, most people embark on the entire journey wrong. As dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it, it was “cold comfort” to know that “the president…is being prosecuted in an unofficial capacity like everyone else” because “officially “The distinction from unofficial behavior” is both “arbitrary and irrational” because…when a president uses his unparalleled official power to commit crimes, the risk of abuse of power and dictatorship is most terrifying.” She is right that giving the president unique sweeping powers and responsibilities “actually emphasizes, rather than diminishes, the serious risks of setting aside criminal law when the president exercises these powers.”
I’ll leave it to others to sort out the convoluted puzzle left by the Court, which lacks meaningful guidelines for distinguishing the different categories of presidential conduct it enumerates. My main conclusions from this shameful decision are three: First, there is an urgent need for Supreme Court reform, including a plan to impose enforceable ethics rules and term limits and possibly add a few more seats to offset The impact of the Trump presidency on the courts. Second, we should start planning for a constitutional amendment, as I argued in the New York Times, to create a federal prosecutorial agency that is structurally independent of the president; third, we need a constitutional amendment that would Article I, Section 9, adds to the prohibition on titles of nobility and foreign emoluments a clause that expressly states that nothing in the Constitution shall be construed to confer immunity from criminal prosecution because of the defendant’s ownership of any property.
It wouldn’t take long to amend the Constitution to fix the problems created by the Supreme Court. When the court in Oregon v. Mitchell blocked Congress from lowering the voting age to 18 for states and federal elections, it took us less than seven months to pass the 26th Amendment to fix that mistake. The court can quickly overturn its own egregiously ill-conceived decisions, as it did in 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett , when it struck down a 1940 law that allowed states to force children to salute the flag in order to A ruling that goes against their religious beliefs. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote, “Wisdom often never arrives, so one should not reject it simply because it comes too late.” Trump v. United States is not just unwise. This is a betrayal of the Constitution. Overturning it should be an issue in this November’s election.
