As Many As Six Far-Right Justices Seem Open To Idea Of Granting Trump Immunity From All Crimes, Allowing Him To Rule Over U.S. As Unrestrained Dictator
In the words of MAGA Sam Alito, total immunity for criminal presidents "is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society". It's REQUIRED!
The questions posed and comments stated during oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court in late April concerning Donald Trump’s bogus, illogical, and desperate claim of absolute impunity immunity from criminal prosecution of any kind reveal (as if there was any doubt) the highest court in the country is ruled by a radical, bribe-accepting, neo-fascist gang of scandalously corrupt criminals who see nothing wrong with quoting witch trial judges from the 17th century. to support their inhumane decisions.
Supreme Court Poised To Transform The Presidency, Empower Trump If Re-Elected
Kim Wehle, The Bulwark, April 25, 2024
Criminal laws exist to deter bad conduct. And ironically, it’s bad conduct—trying to steal an election and stoking violence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power—that in this moment is giving the Supreme Court occasion to enhance the power of presidents to do that kind of thing with even greater impunity.
And here’s a further disturbing thought . . . If Trump wins in November, he will go after Biden criminally, so maybe the kind of presidential immunity being debated by the Court today is needed to protect against the virulent political prosecutions that Trump has promised will immediately follow his inauguration.
SCOTUS Majority Abandons Conservative Principles To Mount Bizarre Defense Of Trump’s Immunity Claim
Dennis Aftergut, Salon, April 26, 2024
Yesterday’s message from the rightwing justices of the Supreme Court, particularly the male justices, was shocking to any believer in true, conservative jurisprudence and the rule of law. Their questions at the oral argument in the Donald Trump immunity case signaled strongly that they really care more about enhancing presidential power than preserving democracy . . .
The Supreme Court, however, has no such care. In the stunning words of Trump appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “I’m not concerned about the here and now, I’m more concerned about the future.” Justice Samuel Alito said he didn’t want to talk about the “particular facts” but rather to talk “in the abstract.”
The President Could “Assassinate” Political Rivals And Still Enjoy Total Immunity, Trump Lawyer Says . . . Assassinations Could Qualify As “An Official Act”
Nicholas Liu, Salon, April 25, 2024
Trump lawyer John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court on Thursday that his client and other presidents should be entitled to order an assassination of a political rival without fear of prosecution. The claim came as part of a broader argument that Trump should enjoy absolute immunity for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. . . .
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or order someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts that for which he can get immunity?” [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor asked.
“It would depend on the hypothetical,” Sauer responded. “From what we can see, that could well be an official act.”
Donald Trump Had A Fantastic Day In The Supreme Court Today
Ian Millhiser, Vox, April 25, 2024
Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, played his traditional role as the Court’s most dyspeptic advocate for whatever position the Republican Party prefers. At one point, Alito even argued that permitting Trump to be prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election would “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes ... our democracy,” because future presidents who lose elections would mimic Trump’s criminal behavior in order to remain in office and avoid being prosecuted by their successor. . . .
There appears to be a very real chance that five justices will rule that the president of the United States may use his official powers in order to commit very serious crimes.
Sam Alito Says That Donald Trump Is A Maligned Ham Sandwich
Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel, April 25, 2024
I believe that a majority of the court will rule that for private conduct — adopting the Blassingame rule that a President acting as candidate acts in a private role — a former President can be prosecuted.
But whooboy, Sam Alito really really believes everything Trump has said about this being a witch hunt. . . . Sam Alito believes that Donald Trump should not have to be inconvenienced by a trial while he could be doing something else. Sam Alito also believes that January 6 was a mostly peaceful protest.
Alito even suggested that a President would be more likely to engage in violence after a closely contested election if he knew he might be prosecuted for it than not.
It was fairly insane.
The Supreme Court Majority Sounds Sold On Trump’s Big Lie; The Conservative Justices Do Not Want To Talk About January 6
Jay Willis, Balls And Strikes, April 26, 2024
[T]he Republican justices worked diligently to frame the case as a series of abstractions—as fodder for an erudite discussion of constitutional theory that only tangentially and coincidentally implicates the electoral future of their preferred candidate. The calculus was pretty simple: The more time they spend discussing things that are not Donald Trump’s real-world criminality, the less attention Donald Trump’s real-world criminality gets.
A Department of Justice-appointed special counsel has charged Trump with, among other things, conspiracy to defraud the United States. The statutory language is pretty broad, but as the government’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, explained to the Court on Thursday, the law is “designed to protect the functions” of the federal government. “It’s difficult to think of a more critical ‘function’ than the certification of who won the election,” Dreeben said.
Yet even this oblique reference to what Trump actually did was too much for Justice Samuel Alito, who quickly jumped in. “As I said, I’m not talking about the particular facts of this case,” he told Dreeben. Instead, Alito spent much of his allotted time discussing the outer limits of presidential criminality, repeatedly invoking the dangers of a too-lenient test that could allow bad-faith prosecutors to bring groundless actions against hypothetical ex-presidents at some undefined point in the future.
Legal Experts: “Shameful” Supreme Court Puts US One Vote Away From “The End Of Democracy”
Charles R. Davis, Salon, April 29, 2024
It’s not a hard question, or at least it hasn’t been before: Does the United States have a king — one empowered to do as they please without even the pretext of being governed by a law higher than their own word — or does it have a president? . . .
[A]t oral arguments last week, conservative justices on the Supreme Court — which took up the case rather than cosign the February ruling — appeared desperate to make the simple appear complex. Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, argued that accountability was what would actually lead to lawlessness.
“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked Michael Dreeben, the lawyer representing special counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice. . . .
Not all of the court’s right-wing members went as far as Alito, making legal accountability the mother of tyranny . . . [b]ut when faced with the absurd — a legal rationale for political assassinations, couched in the language of the U.S. Constitution — none were willing to come out and ask: What are we even doing here? . . .
Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, said the oral arguments were “embarrassing.” Instead of a court hearing, it felt more like congressional showmanship, Tribe told MSNBC; even if it doesn’t end in a total victory for Trump, the hearing itself gave him most of what he wanted – a delay, with any ruling likely to prevent voters from hearing the case against him before they elect another president-king. “It was a shameful performance by the court,” Tribe said, “buying the very time that Donald Trump wanted.” . . .
“I’m profoundly disturbed about the apparent direction of the court,” J. Michael Luttig told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “I now believe that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.” . . .
“The conservative justices’ argument for immunity assumes that Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump is politically corrupt and seeks a rule that would prevent future presidents from corruptly prosecuting their predecessors,” Luttig said. “But such a rule would license all future presidents to commit crimes against the United States while in office with impunity. Which is exactly what Trump is arguing he’s entitled to do.”
Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, believes the very fact that the Supreme Court took up the case is alarming. Appearing on MSNBC, he said the very fact Trump’s legal arguments are being considered is a victory for the former president, likely delaying his election-interference trial until after November. But that the court is seriously considering his claim to immunity for all “official acts” taken as president signals that American democracy is in a terrible state. . . . “[T]here were justices who actually were taking this seriously. And it just was, frankly, shocking.”
The Supreme Court Majority Sounds Sold On Trump’s Big Lie
Heather Digby Parton, Salon, April 29, 2024
I had no expectations that the right-wing Supreme Court majority would act with restraint on this issue. Bush v. Gore cured me of faith that they have any integrity when a presidential election is on the line. But going into the Supreme Court arguments last week, I think most legal scholars expected the court to be at least somewhat disdainful of the idea that a president must be allowed to be a criminal or he can’t do the job. But it turns out that at least four of them, and possibly even six, are quite open to the idea. . . .
[T]hey’ve bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are partisan exercises brought by his “bitter political opponent.” And they are clearly prepared to use their own vast, unaccountable power to even out the score.
If they had any concern about their institution’s credibility they wouldn’t have even heard the case. . . .
It’s disconcerting to realize that the right-wing legal intelligentsia is infected with Fox News Brain Rot all the way to the top. . . . [I]t’s permeated the entire GOP legal establishment from state attorneys general to judges . . .
And now we see this extremist majority on the Supreme Court acting as rank partisan operators to ensure that a blatant criminal gets every chance to seize power so that he can pacify his broken psyche by wreaking revenge on his enemies. And they seem to be open to taking down our democracy in the process.
The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do To Shock Us
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, April 25, 2024
These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims. . . .
Justice Samuel Alito best captured the spirit of arguments when he asked gravely “what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society” (good start!), then answered his own question: total immunity for criminal presidents (oh, dear). Indeed, anything but immunity would, he suggested, encourage presidents to commit more crimes to stay in office: “Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Never mind that the president in question did not leave office peacefully and is not sitting quietly in retirement but is instead running for presidential office once again. No, if we want criminal presidents to leave office when they lose, we have to let them commit crimes scot-free. If ever a better articulation of the legal principle “Don’t make me hit you again” has been proffered at an oral argument, it’s hard to imagine it. . . .
Five justices sent the message, loud and clear, that they are far more worried about Trump’s prosecution at the hands of the deep-state DOJ than about his alleged crimes, which were barely mentioned. . . . [T]e court has now signaled that nothing he did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors. These men have picked their team. The rest hardly matters.
Is SCOTUS In On The Coup And Trying To End American Democracy?
The Simple Reality Is That Conservatives Throughout Modern History Have Viewed Democracy With A Jaundiced Eye, And The Supreme Court’s Republican Appointees Are No Exception . . .
Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report, April 26, 2024
Throughout the entire two-plus hours, Republican justices (with the possible exceptions of Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts) implicitly supported Trump’s attempted coup (that Justice Thomas’ wife was in the middle of).
Trump’s attorney argued — with the apparent agreement of four of the six Republican appointees — that if Trump were reelected he could assassinate people, stage a military coup, and sell America’s military secrets to Putin with no consequences whatsoever. . . .
The simple reality is that conservatives throughout modern history have viewed democracy with a jaundiced eye, and the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are no exception. To their minds democracy is fine when it puts them and their patrons in power, but when it fails at that it’s an impediment to wealth and power that must be circumnavigated.
As one of history’s most famous conservatives, England’s Edmund Burke, noted in the late 18th century, when people engaged in “servile” occupations like hairdresser or candle-maker are allowed to participate in democracy by voting, the state suffers “oppression” and is “at war with nature”:
“The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honour to any person — to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”
It was 1951 when Russell Kirk, the godfather of the modern conservative movement, published his book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in which he laid out the importance of “classes and orders” in society. (I detailed Kirk extensively in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)
The middle class was growing like a weed back then — this was before Reagan kneecapped the labor movement — and Kirk warned that if too many people got into the middle class and were no longer “the fearful poor” that there would be chaos in America.
He warned that too much middle class wealth would mean that women would no longer fear and respect their husbands, racial minorities would forget their “rightful place” in the social order, young people would defy their parents, and society would generally go to hell.
Kirk’s solution, dictated back in the late 1700s by Burke himself, was to gut the middle class and return to the “normal” social form of a small number of really rich people at the top, a tiny middle class of doctors, lawyers, and professionals who served the rich, and a massive class of the working poor.
This was the Victorian world Charles Dickens wrote about in almost all of his novels, and, when the 1960s happened and women, students, and minorities rose up in protest, became the world that Reaganomics was established to return us to.
Re-impoverishing America’s working class families to avoid the dire consequences Burke and Kirk identified, Reagan declared war on unions, gave the rich massive tax cuts, gutted federal support for education (creating today’s student debt crisis), and started the GATT/NAFTA negotiations that led to over 50,000 factories and over 15 million good union jobs being shipped overseas.
Every Republican president since has doubled down on Reagan’s campaign to devastate both the American middle class and the democracy that once supported them: Bush and Trump added tens of trillions to our debt with their tax breaks for billionaires, all three Republican presidents since Reagan packed the courts with democracy-skeptical ideologues, and each has worked to enrich the wealthy while cutting aid and support to working class and poor Americans.
Gutting the middle class, eliminating the social safety net, and “restoring order” to society is still the conservative mantra, now heavily overlaid with racist tropes and rightwing Christian ideology.
So Posobiec’s proclamation that it’s time to replace democracy with strongman authoritarianism, and the endorsement of that worldview by Republicans on the Court with yesterday’s dog-and-pony show, is just another variation on Kirk’s and Burke’s distrust of what John Adams famously and angrily called “the rabble.”
This is not a new debate. . . .
From gutting both civil and voting rights, to kneecapping union rights, to helping George W. Bush steal the 2000 election that Al Gore won in Florida by more than 40,000 votes, the Court’s conservative majority has steadfastly held to the Burkean belief that too much democracy is a danger that can only be balanced by handing as much wealth and political power as possible to the morbidly rich.
Which is why expanding the Supreme Court and establishing a code of conduct for its members via a new Judiciary Act must become one of the first jobs of a second Biden administration.
The fear of that happening, in fact, may well be one of the reasons why Republicans on the Court went so far out of their way to help Trump return to the White House via the delays they’ve inflicted on Jack Smith’s efforts to hold him to justice.
Trump’s attempted coup is nowhere near done: both the Republican Party and the Republicans on the Supreme Court are working as hard as they can to complete it and replace American democracy with naked oligarchy.
This isn't scary at all. Nah.