I agree with Ms. Tannehill that merely the fact alone that Trump's argument is not "going down in flames 9-0" is scandalous enough, even if it were defeated! Does anyone fail to see that giving any sitting president immunity even against prosecution for assassinating his political opponents will practically guarantee that our beloved nation will eventually devolve into an absolute despotism--even if Trump loses this election? That anyone stupid and/or corrupt enough to approve of that position managed to get to be a Supreme Court Justice is appalling and sorrowful!Brynn Tannehill wrote:This week, the Supreme Court managed to fail to meet the already extremely low expectations most sane people already had for it. First, during the Idaho EMTALA case on whether hospitals receiving federal funding can refuse to provide abortions to women who are actively dying as a result of a pregnancy, we heard debate on which, and how many, organs a woman had to lose before an abortion becomes legally acceptable. By all appearances during oral arguments, it looks as though the court is going to gut the already laughably weak “life of the mother” protections by a 5-4 vote.
They followed this abysmal performance up with hearing the Trump immunity case the next day, and the comportment of the same five male, conservative justices was even worse. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.”
Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave it to some future court to decide whether it was an official act, because he’ll get away with it as long as there aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to impeach. And given that it will have been established that the president can put out a contract on political foes, how many senators are going to vote to impeach?
Even if a political opponent were proven to be corrupt, allowing the President to order that opponent be peremptorily assassinated should be unacceptable. If the claim that a President is entitled to such absolute immunity stands, what would prevent Biden from having Trump assassinated if he perceived that Trump (whom Biden with very good reason believes is as corrupt as they come) were likely to win the coming election?But the justices did not laugh this argument out of court. Quite the contrary: At least five of the justices seemed to buy into the Trump team’s arguments that the power of the office of the president must be protected from malicious and politicized litigation. They were uninterested in the actual case at hand or its consequences. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, perhaps captured my response to the Supreme Courts’ arguments best: “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
These justices’ foolishness lies in their lack of foresight as to what happens if Trump wins in 2024. In the justice’s efforts to ensure that they are the most powerful branch of government, they are about to make it the weakest. They are creating a win-win situation for Trump, and a lose-lose for themselves. When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the court’s perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere… unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?
The Roberts Court surely believes that Trump would never stoop to this—that the sanctity of court and the laws and norms of our democracy will protect them. Anyone who has spent 10 minutes studying how democracies collapse knows this is idiotic, but it stems from their own hubristic belief that the court is so powerful and respected that it is immune to everything. They believe the respect for the institution will ensure their power endures.
Are these Justices so underinformed that they are unaware that public respect for their institution is currently already at a low time ebb because of some of their recent rulings?
In the end, the court appears to be doing everything to destroy itself, democracy, and the union, with its own arrogance and lack of foresight. They’ve either castrated themselves, and in the process doomed the country, or signed their own death warrants.
