Blame Jack Smith’s Prosecutorial Adventurism for the Supreme Court’s Immunity Decision
The Lawfare Campaign Shipwrecks Itself at the High Court
For all the progressives, including Never Trumpers with progressive mentalities, who condemn the Supreme Court Majority’s opinion out of hand, for conferring on the president the unchecked powers of a king, it’s remarkable that none of them has the sense of irony to observe that if it weren’t for Jack Smith’s novel charges, or for that matter the Biden DOJ’s misguided—indeed increasingly boneheaded—decision to indict Biden’s political opposition, the Supreme Court would not have had cause to issue what was, I acknowledge, a somewhat unsettling ruling.
However that a president should enjoy absolute immunity for the official acts he undertakes in his constitutionally defined, and thus constitutionally limited, capacity as executive is not, on its face, a bold claim. And assuredly unless a case affecting Trump—fascist, insurrectionist, threat to democracy, etc.— were in the docket, then it would not have caused such a stir. If it weren’t for Trump’s lawyers arguing (facetiously to be sure) that the president had every right to use Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, the striking thing about this ruling would be its banality.
You could imagine one retorting in a world any other than this one with Donald Trump (hard to imagine, I know),
Of course the president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
How else would Abraham Lincoln have used the military to suppress violent mobs during the Draft Riots? Otherwise how could FDR put Asians in internment camps when we were at war with Japan? How could any of some of our greatest leaders have done what they had to do—or with recourse to internment camps, what at least they believed they had to do at the time— in the name of the national interest if they didn’t believe they already enjoyed absolute immunity? How could they do half the things they did and do with the threat of criminal prosecution hanging over their every official decision?
Cue the cringy progressive slogan, nobody is above the law. Like the commander in chief of the armed forces, leader of the most powerful country in the world, is no less liable than Joe Blow, the Constitution be damned— this sanctimonious bromide is an insult to any American’s proper conception of the nature and tradition of representative republican government, where yeah, one would hope the president has a little more latitude than your next door neighbor.
Besides to invoke that nobody is above the law in any reference to Trump is rank demagoguery. If it weren’t for the progressive need to compulsively demagogue every Supreme Court ruling though, they might appreciate how the immunity ruling makes explicit that a reelected Donald Trump couldn’t prosecute Joe Biden. Perhaps not even for willfully withholding classified documents as Trump did, himself; or some of the less controversial but still brazenly lawless things Biden did as president, like cancelling student debt without congressional authorization, or opening the door to millions of undocumented illegal migrants in defiance of the Immigration Nationality Act stipulating that asylum seekers must be detained.
Let me gleefully say here what no conservative I’ve come across has had the provocative sensibility to bluntly state, the president is above the law. He not just is, but he also has to be above the law. Unless we would have liked Harry Truman feasibly to be prosecuted for dropping the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or, we would have liked it if Eisenhower faced prosecution for using the military to enforce desegregation. No one is above the law? Not even the president of the United States of America? Please.
What the progressive reaction to Trump v United States, and anyone who genuinely believes the president should be permitted to be prosecuted for foreseeably any crime an ordinary person might commit, is, to say the least, revealing of the low regard in which progressives hold our institutions. But it makes sense that, though they make no mention of the fact that the court also ruled that presidents don’t enjoy absolute immunity for unofficial acts, they agonize over whether a bad guy has now been given a license to abuse his power with impunity, because they have already written off the institutional legitimacy of the court, comprised of impartial judges, that would pose the primary obstacle to such abuses. In her concurrence, moreover, Amy Coney Barrett even pointed out that Trump may not have immunity for his schemes to organize false slates of electors to subvert the results of the last election.
However the single most annoying thing to me is how progressives have the unchecked self-righteous pomposity to worry that Trump might go after his political enemies in another term when progressives and the Biden administration have done nothing if not abuse their power to go after their political enemies. As a matter of fact, one reason people are so angry with the Supreme Court’s decision is because it frustrates the Democratic attempts to hunt their political enemies, Donald Trump!
They secured a conviction in Manhattan anyway, but that’s not enough. To see justice— i.e. justice!— served, ideally, all the Jack Smith indictments would have to go swimmingly, convicting Trump for this, and for that, all before the November election, where Trump is so humiliated that independents who may hate a doddering old man, with no major legislative achievements to his name (chip fabs?), to whom you may only accurately credit needless high inflation, runaway peacetime deficit spending, the cut-and-run betrayal of Afghanistan, illegal migrants, a crack addicted son who lied about his addiction to buy a handgun but “did nothing wrong,” and openly antisemitic mobs of deranged imported Islamists who could hardly have failed worse to assimilate to polite Western society—but vote for him anyway, because they won’t vote for a “felon.”
Presumably it doesn’t matter if he’s a felon, too, only because the hush money Trump was found to have paid to a pornstar he misfiled as legal expenses, and this was misconstrued somehow to constitute unlawful interference in an election or something. Or rather the nature of the charges just shouldn’t matter, because, to progressives, a felon is a felon. Because he was convicted by a jury, we’re supposed to believe that’s ironclad proof it was an airtight case that Alvin Bragg had every merit to prosecute. I should add it’s hilarious that progressives resent the Court interfering in political affairs on Trump’s behalf, when that was exactly what courts did in Maine, New Hampshire and Colorado absurdly to try to strike Trump off the ballot.
Moreover the Court would have no need to interfere and give these ambiguous though important rulings on presidential immunity, remanding the issue to a lower court— not if it weren’t for Democratic law fare. If it’s not too bold, I will say it was Jack Smith who effectively gave Donald Trump absolute immunity. And that is only because since no one is above the law, no one is above taking everything and everyone to court.
What is the ultra MAGA Supreme Court supposed to do?
Oh right— help the Democratic Party hunt their political enemies for them by letting unaccountable justices strike Trump off the ballot for crimes that he hasn’t even been convicted of or even indicted for; and/or heeding Jack Smith’s pleas to expedite Trump’s trials before the election because it was in the “public interest—” never mind due process. No one is above the law, the president is like any ordinary man, however when it comes to Trump, unlike an ordinary man, he is not entitled to due process.
I can’t say how sorry I am, progressives, that the Supreme Court didn’t abandon itself to the will of Jack Smith and the whims of the Democratic Party to save “our democracy.”
— Jay