In the sharp shape of modern American life, there’s always room for a real-good, high-pitched scream, and this morning is an example. Our SCOTUS just shit our country’s mess kit.
Via The Washington Post:
The Supreme Court held Monday not only that Donald Trump could not be prosecuted for official acts but that those acts could not be used as evidence of a crime.
“That proposal threatens to eviscerate the immunity we have recognized,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. “It would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly — invite the jury to examine acts for which a President is immune from prosecution to nonetheless prove his liability on any charge.”
Scream out loud right now:
The US Supreme Court announcing that presidents are now kings during the week they celebrate their independence from Kings is some call. pic.twitter.com/gkBE24BqCR
— Tull McAdoo (@TullMcAdoo) July 1, 2024
Of course, the shitty end first — via Vox:
Broadly speaking, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion reaches three conclusions. The first is that when the president takes any action under the authority given to him by the Constitution itself, his authority is “conclusive and preclusive” and thus he cannot be prosecuted. Thus, for example, a president could not be prosecuted for pardoning someone, because the Constitution explicitly gives the chief executive the “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”
One question that has loomed over this case for months is whether presidential immunity is so broad that the president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. While this case was before a lower court, one judge asked if Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and Trump’s lawyer answered that he could not unless Trump had previously been successfully impeached and convicted for doing so.
Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.
However, your asshole honor:
if President Biden declared today's Supreme Court ruling to be an assault on democracy and ordered Chief Justice John Roberts imprisoned indefinitely, would that be an "official act?"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2024
Whoa! Tricky Dick was apparently right:
Immune from T-Rump disease, or not, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here.)