IMMUNITY RULING For Biden is IN
The liberal justices on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority ruling on presidential immunity, arguing that it permitted a number of terrifying possibilities, such as a president directing a Navy SEAL team to “assassinate” a political rival or even poisoning a member of his own cabinet.
A president is granted extensive protection for official conduct committed while in office, the Supreme Court decided on Monday, 6-3. The ruling has noteworthy ramifications for former president Trump, whose legal actions over the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol hack and purported meddling in the 2020 election prompted the Supreme Court to take up the matter.
But even though Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion made it clear that the president “is not above the law” and that immunity only applies when there has been an “official act,”—the justices remanded the case to lower courts so they could decide whether the acts at issue in Trump’s case qualified as “official”—the ruling raised a number of terrifying possibilities, for the three dissenting justices.
The principal dissent of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan said that the majority ruling of the court “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”
“Possibly the most powerful person in the world is the President of the United States of America. According to the majority’s logic, he will now be shielded from criminal prosecution whenever he exercises his official authority in whatever capacity, Sotomayor wrote. “Directs the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent?”
“Let the President break the law, let him take advantage of the perks of his position for personal benefit, let him use his official authority for bad intentions,” she went on. Because he would not be as brave and courageous as we would want him to be if he knew that he could eventually be held accountable for breaching the law. The message of the majority today is that.”
The relationship between the president and the American people has “shifted irrevocably,” according to Sotomayor, since “in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Jackson offered a footnote from a different dissent that contains still another shocking possibility.
“While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death,” Jackson remarks, noting that the removal of a cabinet member by the president would be an official act.
She continues: “Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.”
