SCOTUS crowns Trump king and sets fire to American democracy

"The President is now a king above the law...
"...With fear for our democracy, I dissent."
~ Sonya Sotomayor, in her dissent to July 1, 2024 SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity

On July 1, 2024, the six members of the deeply corrupt Christofascist/Trumpist supermajority in the Supreme Court of the United States did what millions of us feared they would do: they presented a huge, sloppy gift-wrapped package of immunity to #NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump to shield him from any real accountability for his many and serious crimes against American voters, American national security, and American democracy. Specifically, the Court ruled that a president has absolute immunity from criminal charges for any "official" act committed while in office, though not immunity from any "private" act.

Which even someone with only a rudimentary understanding of the United States Constitution and the law can see leaves far too much leeway for interpretation of "official" versus "private" acts. The fact that courts are forbidden from even considering a president's motive when determining whether an act is official or private makes the decision all the more insidious, and outrageous.

The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. From the intro to that dissent:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

Chief Justice John Roberts engaged in furious gaslighting regarding the seriousness of the Trump v. United States decision, saying that the dissents "strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today." Don't believe a word of it. From a July 1 opinion piece in Slate.com by Mark Joseph Stern:

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority fundamentally altered American democracy on Monday, awarding the president a sweeping and novel immunity when he weaponizes the power of his office for corrupt, violent, or treasonous purposes. This near-insurmountable shield against prosecution for crimes committed while in office upends the structure of the federal government, elevating the presidency to a king-like status high above the other branches. The immediate impact of the court’s sweeping decision will be devastating enough, allowing Donald Trump to evade accountability for the most destructive and criminal efforts he took to overturn the 2020 election. But the long-term impact is even more harrowing. It is unclear, after Monday’s decision, what constitutional checks remain to stop any president from assuming dangerous and monarchical powers that are anathema to representative government. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her terrified and terrifying dissent, “the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump v. United States, Monday’s decision, has no basis in the Constitution as written. Donald Trump brought the case as a delay tactic, an effort to run out the clock on his prosecution before the November election. Special counsel Jack Smith has charged the former president with a series of crimes related to his conspiracy to block the peaceful transition of power in 2020, culminating in the insurrection of Jan. 6. The indictment weaves a narrative of election subversion out of various actions the president took—many of which involved abuse of his office. In response, Trump raised a claim of “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for any “official act” he took before leaving the White House. The theory was, again, largely designed to stall the case, but also meant to shield him from the most damning charges if the case moved forward. First, the Supreme Court abetted his stalling strategy, taking up the appeal then sitting on it for months. Now it has rewarded his larger plan, too, cutting the legs from Smith’s indictment...

It's worth your time to read the entire piece, which, though billed as opinion, breaks down the facts quite well.

And if you want more specifics about why this SCOTUS decision is so frightening, read the July 2 analysis on Slate by the aforementioned Mr. Stern and Dahlia Lithwick, who were joined by Brown University professor of constitutional law and political theory Corey Brettschneider, author of the new book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. Here's the headline:

Can the President Send SEAL Team Six to Assassinate His Rival? After Monday, Yes.

That headline would most likely be poo-pooed by John Roberts too, but we already know that he's a gaslighting gasbag. Here's a snippet from the conversation:

Lithwick: Corey, the court is drawing all these lines, like “core functions” vs. “outer perimeter,” that make it sound like they’re solving a math problem. Can you help us understand what a sea change this actually is? Because this is not just a Donald Trump story. This is a separation-of-powers story and fundamentally a structural change to democracy as we understand it.

Corey Brettschneider: You know, the court claims that it has this method of originalism that requires us to look at the text of the Constitution as it was originally understood. So you would expect, in a monumental decision like this—granting immunity to a former president’s “official acts”—that the Constitution would say something about presidential immunity. But it doesn’t. There was a disagreement at the founding about this: John Adams, for instance, defended the idea that presidents are immune from prosecution, which suits his disposition toward an aggrandized idea of presidential power. On the other side, though, there was James Wilson; at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, he said the thing that we thought defined our Constitution until Monday—that no person, not even a president, is above the law, and the president can be prosecuted.

So it’s not like there was some universal understanding of presidential immunity at the founding. There’s no textual evidence in the Constitution. The Framers just disagreed when they talked about this issue. So the idea that this is based on originalism is false. And the main precedent they do rely on, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, gets extended way beyond what it actually said. I’d argue Roberts is saying something contrary to what that case actually said. And we have stronger cases on the other side, like U.S. v. Nixon, which held that a president facing a criminal subpoena is not above the law. They may claim to respect precedent, but they’re not doing it. They may claim to respect text, but they aren’t. And they may claim to respect history, as if the Framers sort of agreed about this, but that’s not true either.

Of course Slate was far from the only media outlet to have a few words to say about the effects of the July 1 decision. The web is a veritable conflagration of reports and analyses about SCOTUS' latest attempts to burn down America and recreate it as Trumpistan.

As President Joe Biden said, echoing the words of Justice Sotomayor, "I dissent."

And speaking of President Biden, despite his historic respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, and the office of the presidency, lots of folks are suggesting, with various degrees of seriousness, that he should take full advantage of his current status as "king." But the reality is that SCOTUS only crowned Trump king, not Biden. As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out on her July 1, 2024 Substack:

...this extraordinary power grab does not mean President Joe Biden can do as he wishes. As legal commentator Asha Rangappa pointed out, the court gave itself the power to determine which actions can be prosecuted and which cannot by making itself the final arbiter of what is “official” and what is not. Thus any action a president takes is subject to review by the Supreme Court, and it is reasonable to assume that this particular court would not give a Democrat the same leeway it would give Trump. 

So, yeah... don't believe John Roberts. The SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity is very big deal, and it's truly awful, and the only way we can possibly delay, if not stop, a total fascist takeover of America is for all eligible and registered voters who still believe in American democracy and the rule of law to Vote Blue in November. Or as President Biden reminded us, “Now the American people will have to do what the court should have been willing to do and would not: Americans will have to render a judgment about Donald Trump’s behavior."

For now, as a Facebook friend of mine, journalist and author David Theis, wrote, "This will be my first 4th of July in mourning."

Let's take a few days to mourn, and then let's double down on our efforts to keep Trump out of the Oval Office forever.

Before you leave...
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Overturning Roe: The Handmaid's Tale takes another giant step towards reality

With the not-unexpected but nevertheless disastrous United States Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade on June 24, 2022, Margaret Atwood's famous dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, just took another giant step towards being art imitated by life.

And the late great singer/songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen was wrong: it's theocracy, not democracy, that's coming to the USA.

I don't believe that any thinking person on either side of the abortion issue thinks that the theocrats and Christo-fascists are going to stop at Roe, despite implied assurances within the majority opinion that the June 24 decision is solely about the constitutional right, or lack thereof, to abortion. Senior SCOTUS fascist Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion to the decision, has called for the overturning of other precedents that are founded in principles such as the right to privacy: specifically, decisions protecting the right to contraception, to same-sex intimate relationships, and to same-sex marriage.

Notably, in his opinion Thomas apparently did not mention the Loving v Virginia SCOTUS decision that, in June of 1967, finally legitimized interracial marriages. A few wags on Twitter have suggested that he add the Loving decision to his list of cases to be reconsidered/overturned, since it would most likely be cheaper than a divorce, should Thomas be considering a break from his seditionist, bat-crap crazy wife Ginni. But I digress.

In their dissenting opinion, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan made the significance and utter gravity of the SCOTUS decision on abortion very clear:

For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be... Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions....

The dissenting Justices also made it clear that the abortion decision is almost certainly not the end of the line for the theocrats. They're just getting started.

...no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.

In a statement sent to People magazine, Jim Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the historic Obergefell v. Hodge case that legitimized same-sex marriage, wrote:

"Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice appointed by humans, he is not the Supreme Deity. The millions of loving couples who have the right to marriage equality to form their own families do not need Clarence Thomas imposing his individual twisted morality upon them. If you want to see an error in judgment, Clarence Thomas, look in the mirror."

Indeed.

All in all, things are looking pretty grim, and on track to get even grimmer. So hold on to your white wimples, Handmaids; it's going to be quite a ride -- and the fight is far from over.

Addendum, June 25, 2022: SCOTUS wrecking ball targeted other issues besides Roe
Unfortunately, Roe wasn't the only matter this past week in which the high court managed to do significant damage to more than a half century of progress. Here are its other major achievements for the week:

June 21, 2022: Kicking another big hole in the wall between church and state (and thumbing its nose at LGBTQ rights)

In a 6-3 vote, the court ruled Tuesday that Maine could not prohibit parents from using a state-funded tuition assistance program to pay for their children to attend private religious schools while permitting them to do so in private secular schools. The two schools cited in the case have a history of homophobic and transphobic policies.

The ruling in Carson v. Makin is a continuation of the conservative-majority court’s recent willingness to poke holes in the barrier between church and state. A number of LGBTQ advocacy organizations and other supporters of queer rights are sounding the  alarm about what the decision signals about the court’s direction, especially when it comes to reconciling religious freedom with safeguarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people from discrimination. 

June 23, 2022: Seriously weakening states' rights to impose their own gun control laws

For anyone concerned with the havoc associated with guns in this country, Thursday was a day of highs and lows. The Senate, after decades of inaction, passed a bipartisan gun-safety bill by a vote of 65–33. And the Supreme Court, in its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, struck down a New York law by a vote of 6the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol –3. The majority opinion in Association v. Bruen, was written by and joined by the Court’s Clarence Thomas five other conservatives, and it is broad and reckless. It will expose any number of well-established laws to similar challenges, and rattle efforts to arrive at a national consensus on guns. If the Senate was the scene of a true breakthrough, the Court was the site of a major breakdown.

June 23, 2022: Kneecapping Miranda

Today, in Vega v. Tekoh, the court backtracked substantially on its Miranda promise. In Vega, the court held 6-3 (over an excellent dissent by Justice Elena Kagan) that an individual who is denied Miranda warnings and whose compelled statements are introduced against them in a criminal trial cannot sue the police officer who violated their rights, even where a criminal jury finds them not guilty of any crime. By denying people whose rights are violated the ability to seek redress under our country’s most important civil rights statute, the court has further widened the gap between the guarantees found in the Bill of Rights and the people’s ability to hold government officials accountable for violating them.

As someone on Twitter wrote, "I went to bed in 2022 and woke up in 1950." If the current SCOTUS majority and the fascist political infrastructure that supports them continue to prevail, the US is going to be plummeted even further back than 1950.

Addendum, July 12, 2022: The worst may be yet to come
The cases above are just a few examples of the destruction SCOTUS wreaked in their latest session. For a more complete review of their "accomplishments," see this.

And the worst may be yet to come when SCOTUS hears and rules on Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina case that is potentially the biggest threat to American democracy since January 6. The case, which will be heard in October 2022, involves independent state legislature doctrine and gerrymandering. If SCOTUS rules in North Carolina's favor, that could seriously impact the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, not to mention numerous local and state elections across the US. In practical terms, it could put the rethuglican party in power in the US indefinitely, regardless of actual popular vote or Electoral College outcomes. And regardless of your party affiliation, that should bother you. A lot. If it doesn't, you are definitely part of a very big problem.