Maybe this July 4th the Alitos will raise the American flag accordingly. No the other way around, in their homes in Virginia or New Jersey.
After all, this is the 248th anniversary of America's founders' declaration of independence, but I'm guessing Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his flag-loving wife, Martha-Ann, are celebrating that he and his fellow right-wing Supreme Court justices have turned our presidents into kings — just when it seems more likely that Donald Trump could be restored to the throne.
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
The court's ruling on Monday in the aptly titled Trump vs. the United States It was a gift to the former president. Trump got almost everything he asked for despite the majority’s specious attempts to make it seem otherwise: absolute or presumptive immunity for official acts, which the court defined in a way that could encompass much of what the Jan. 6 criminal indictment alleges the former president illegally did to overturn the 2020 election.
Moreover, the court’s delay — which took months to decide the case and, with its decision, imposed lengthy pretrial procedures to determine what is or is not covered by the court’s notions of immunity — ensures that Trump will not be tried before the 2024 election for trying to steal the previous election. The classified documents case in federal court in Florida and the state case in Atlanta alleging that Trump pressured Georgia officials to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory there, both already delayed for various reasons, will be further sidetracked as the justices’ decision is scrutinized.
The ruling also called into question Trump's recent conviction in the only criminal trial he has faced, in Manhattan. On Tuesday, Judge Juan M. Merchan delayed Trump's sentencing The case will be heard from next Thursday through Sept. 18 to weigh the ramifications. That case involved Trump’s personal acts in fraudulently reporting hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election, so it was not an official presidential act. But his lawyers argue that some of the evidence that convicted Trump comes from his time as president and should therefore be off limits, according to the high court’s decision.
“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a blistering dissent in favor of the court’s three liberals.
Happy Independence Day? Millions of us might be tempted to fly our upside-down flags as a universal sign of extreme need.
Fifty years ago this month, a very different Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States vs. Nixon (just 16 days after oral arguments in the case!) that President Nixon had to hand over the Oval Office tapes to a special prosecutor. The recordings placed him at the sordid center of the Watergate scandal and led to his resignation weeks later.
One quote from the time summed up the bipartisan consensus of Americans on the role of the press, the Senate hearings, the House impeachment inquiry, the special counsel investigation and the Supreme Court's expedited decision: The system worked.
I could never have imagined, as a college student who followed the Watergate case closely, that half a century later another Supreme Court would radically change the legal basis of United States v. Nixon: that executive privilege must give way to “the fair administration of criminal justice.” In our time, the system – our leaders and institutions of government – has failed.
Remember that after the House of Representatives impeached Trump for provoking the attack on the Capitol on January 6, Senate Republicans blocked his conviction because Trump had become a private citizen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, sure He tells us that Trump could respond differently: “We have a criminal justice system in this country… and former presidents They are not immune accountability.” Trump's lawyers said the same thing during his Senate impeachment trial.
On Monday, the Supreme Court basically told us otherwise.
This comes from a court with a Republican supermajority, including three justices picked by Trump in controversial circumstances, and two, Alito and Thomas, who have flouted federal law by refusing to recuse themselves from cases related to Jan. 6 despite their wives’ public displays of sympathy and, in the case of Ginni Thomas, collusion with the “Stop the Steal” insurrection.
During the Watergate case, neither the Supreme Court nor anyone else thought that former presidents had anything like the criminal immunity suggested by the Republican justices on Monday. As Sotomayor noted, both President Ford's immunity and the Republican justices' immunity Nixon's pardon And Nixon’s acceptance letter explicitly assumed that he was responsible, as Nixon wrote, for “any charges that might be brought against me for actions taken during the time I was President.” Why else would there be a pardon?
The Watergate investigation focused on Nixon’s abuse of the Justice Department, FBI, IRS and CIA to target his political enemies. Sound familiar? Yet today’s court says Trump’s post-election contacts with Justice Department appointees are protected official acts. Never mind that he urged them to falsely claim voter fraud in battleground states won by Biden. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump said at that “official act.”
He's already given us reason to fear what he'll do in a second term. Here's one from the eve of the court ruling: Trump republished On social media, there were calls for Liz Cheney to be tried for treason in a televised military tribunal. Thanks to the Supreme Court he created, Trump, in a second term, could do whatever he wanted without fear of criminal liability.
John Dean, who was Nixon's White House lawyer before he testified against him and went to prison for obstruction of justice, expressed outrage at the decision by reviving an infamous Nixon quote.: “'When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.' Richard Nixon, 1974. Confirmed by the US Supreme Court in 2024.”
I'll let Dean have the last word.
@jackiekcalmes
