Supreme Court dissenters take ‘darker’ view of Trump immunity ruling | Wilnesh News

Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan laid out the grim outlook for American democracy in a joint written dissent filed with the court on Monday. Decide Regarding former President Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

“In every use of official power, the president is a king above the law,” Sotomayor wrote. “This majority project will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and our democracy.”

Jackson echoed her warning: “If the structural consequences of today’s paradigm shift mark a step in the wrong direction, the practical consequence is a five-alarm fire that threatens to destroy democratic autonomy and the normal functioning of our government.” .

Alison LaCroix, a legal historian at the University of Chicago, said the dissidents’ alarm was “absolutely alarming” based on written submissions.

“It’s a darker tone. It’s more of a warning,” Lacroix told CNBC. The dissents were written by only three justices nominated by Democratic presidents.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-3 partisan opinion that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution on a case-by-case basis, including when the charges relate to “official” presidential conduct but not from charges of presidential conduct.

The immediate effect is to send special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal election fraud case against Trump back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chatkan. She will have to decide whether the criminal charges relate to official acts Trump committed as president that grant him immunity, or to his private conduct.

The added complexity will almost certainly cause the trial to be delayed until after the Nov. 5 election, a victory for Trump, the presumptive nominee and Republicans.

Chief Justice John Roberts was trying to express the majority’s opinion in a soft move, which is why the dissenters felt the need to mount such a fierce counterattack, LaCroix said.

“Chief Justice Roberts, in the way he often does, is trying to occupy a kind of moderate middle ground and the court as an institution,” LaCroix said. “Dissenters do come back and say, ‘Listen , you need to acknowledge or admit that this is important in itself.'”

“The long-term consequences of today’s decision are serious. The court has effectively created a lawless zone around the president, upending a status quo that has existed since the founding of this country,” Sotomayor wrote.

The dissenters, all appointed by Democratic presidents, argued the ruling would expand executive power beyond what judges can imagine today.

They also presented several hypothetical scenarios of presidential crimes that they claimed would be difficult or impossible to prosecute now.

For example, Sotomayor wrote, if the president “ordered Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent? I would be immune.” “Organizing a military coup to retain power? Immunity. Accepting bribes in exchange for pardon? Immunity. Immune, immunity, immunity.”

Whether the president is immune from “legal liability for murder, assault, theft, fraud or any other reprehensible and unlawful criminal act” now “always and inevitably is: it depends on the circumstances,” Jackson wrote.

Sotomayor added: “Even if these nightmare scenarios never happen, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done.”

Lacroix said that while these assumptions are extreme and “obviously rhetorical,” they are not entirely exaggerated.

“I think what we’ve seen over the last five or six years is that increasingly any hypothesis that people can come up with is becoming something that actually happened or could happen,” she said.

“We’ve seen a lot of norms being broken. I think the lesson over the past five years or so is don’t think anything is completely impossible.”