Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson raised serious questions about the future of democracy in their dissents to the high court’s ruling on Donald Trump’s immunity claims.
The two justices, along with fellow Democratic appointee Elena Kagan, were on the losing side of a 6-3 decision finding that Trump had “absolute immunity” for some of the actions he took to try to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Writing for all three Democratic appointees, Sotomayor found fault with the majority’s ruling that Trump is entitled to at least presumptive immunity for all “official acts,” including talking with the Justice Department or Vice President Mike Pence about his schemes:
Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. […]
When [the President of the United States] uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
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. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
[…] Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Supreme Court justices have previously drawn attention for dropping the word “respectfully” from “I respectfully dissent” as a closing statement, so the final sentence is particularly notable.
In a separate dissent, Jackson added a few words of her own about the decision’s “paradigm shift” for the powers of the presidency:
[…] under the new Presidential accountability model, the starting presumption is that the criminal law does not apply to Presidents, no matter how obviously illegal, harmful, or unacceptable a President’s official behavior might be. Regardless of all that, courts must now ensure that a former President is not held accountable for any criminal conduct he engages in while he is on duty,
[…] the Rule of Law now becomes the rule of judges, with courts pronouncing which crimes committed by a President have to be let go and which can be redressed as impermissible. So, ultimately, this Court itself will decide whether the law will be any barrier to whatever course of criminality emanates from the Oval Office in the future. The potential for great harm to American institutions and Americans themselves is obvious.
Jackson ended with a similarly stark sign-off:
The majority of my colleagues seems to have put their trust in our Court’s ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm. I fear that they are wrong. But, for all our sakes, I hope that they are right. In the meantime, because the risks (and power) the Court has now assumed are intolerable, unwarranted, and plainly antithetical to bedrock constitutional norms, I dissent.
On August 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment with a plutonium core nicknamed the “demon core”. He accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide directly onto the core. This action caused the core to briefly go super critical and expose Harry Daghlian to a lethal burst of radiation. He was able to walk away from the accident, seemingly okay at first, but 25 days later he was dead from acute radiation poisoning. By this time the effects of acute radiation exposure were well known, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He was dead from the moment of the accident, it just took 25 days to come to completion.
This Supreme Court ruling didn’t hurt the country. It has killed the country. It’s like the burst of lethal radiation from the demon core; our country is dead, but it’s going to take some time for the effects to sink in. How long that takes depends on elections and the humanity of the Presidents that are elected. The Supreme Court pulled the pin out of a grenade and handed it to Biden. He now has to pass that grenade to the next President, hoping that each one doesn’t release the lever. But someday, whether Trump in the next Presidency, or somewhere down the line, someone is going to release the lever and blow up our democracy.
And we can’t undo this decision. As Devin from Legal Eagle explains, this is a Constitutional judgement by the Supreme Court. Since it pertains to Constitutional powers, Congress can’t pass a law to limit it in any way. And there’s no higher court to appeal to on this ruling. We would have to pass a Constitutional amendment, or just tear down the whole country to undo this. What could possibly be our path forward from here?
Considering the precedent the current court has set regarding past ruling, couldnt a future court reverse this one?
couldnt a future court reverse this one?
Yes.
[…] Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25), top Democrat of the Committee on House Administration, began the process of introducing a constitutional amendment to reverse the catastrophic harms of the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States days before Independence Day.
“I will introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse SCOTUS’ harmful immunity decision and ensure that no president is above the law. This amendment will do what SCOTUS failed to do – prioritize our democracy,” said Rep. Morelle. “The former president must be held accountable for his decisions. I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and stand with me on the front line to protect our democracy.”
Earlier today, Rep. Morelle issued a statement declaring, in part: “With no basis in precedent, with no understanding of our origins in history, and with no fidelity to the Constitution, the extremists on the Supreme Court have decided that former President Trump is above the law.”
Ironically, the current members of the supreme court do seem to have given the white house the power to execute and replace them with no repercussions.
🤷♀️
I suppose in reality the repercussions would more likely look like a complete upending of the legal system. Honestly, that’s probably inevitable in one way or another at this point.
