The panic over the Supreme Court's immunity decision has reached absurd levels. Today the New York Times reports that our allies can no longer trust us:
“If the U.S. president is free from the restrictions of criminal law, if he has that level of criminal immunity, the other leaders of the allied nations cannot trust the U.S.,” said Keigo Komamura, a professor of law at Keio University in Tokyo. “We cannot maintain a stable national security relationship.”
....In South Korea, political leaders essentially have no legal protections from criminal prosecution once they are out of office — and the president is limited to a single term. Four of the past eight former presidents have been convicted and imprisoned after leaving office for corruption and other crimes they committed before and while they were in office.
This is crazy. Criminal immunity has no effect on international relations. And convicting four of your past eight presidents hardly makes you a poster child for global stability.
I hate to do this since I think the Supreme Court overreached considerably in several ways, but the hair-on-fire attitude over this ruling ("above the law," "now a king," "fearing for our democracy," etc.) really needs to be taken down a notch. I pointed out a few reasons on Monday, but here are several more:
- This was not a final decision. Trump's January 6 case was remanded back to the district court for further hearings, after which it will be appealed and eventually return to the Supreme Court. At that point it's likely that parts of the original ruling will be scaled back and fleshed out.
- The Court didn't literally immunize the president from every possible criminal infraction. Details will have to await a final decision, but it's highly unlikely that the president has immunity from ordinary personal corruption, bribery, etc.
- The president is only immune from most criminal prosecutions. He is still bound by all the normal rules of democracy. He has to be elected. He has to work with Congress. His executive actions have to pass court muster. His aides still have to be confirmed by the Senate. None of that has changed. In fact, the president has a little less power than he used to thanks to the death of Chevron, and election interference was reined in a bit by the Election Reform Act.
- No president has ever been taken to court for criminal behavior before, so this is obviously a pretty rare state of affairs. In any case, fear of prosecution didn't stop Teapot Dome, it didn't stop Watergate, it didn't stop Iran-Contra, and it didn't stop the torture of prisoners under George Bush. In the real world, presidents have never demonstrated much fear of being held criminally responsible for their actions.
- In an analogous sense, CEOs are rarely jailed for criminal activity in their companies even when it's pretty obvious they must have known about it. But nobody runs around suggesting that CEOs operate like nobility of old just because, in a practical sense, they're mostly immune from personal criminal prosecution.
To repeat: yes, the Supreme Court went too far. Their decision is based on neither statute nor the Constitution, which is silent on the matter. They set the boundaries of official action too broadly. They ruled that actions immune from prosecution couldn't even be used as evidence in a trial. They ruled that motivations don't matter.
It's a bad ruling. But it's not the end of democracy.
"Hair on fire" is totally called for, because this isn't the end of it, and because we have an election coming up in a few months that will enable each one of us to start doing something about it.
Our votes count. Who we put into Congress counts. Ditto for the State and Local races. Of course, the Presidency, but I realize Mr Drum is beating his big drum for Trump. I'm not.
Agree it's not the end of democracy. People overreact, but it was a horrible decision. For instance, they remanded the false electors case back to the lower courts but tied the court's hands by not allowing any input from what Trump discussed with aids. There is zero possibility that trying to put in false electors is an official act. Their allowing for what might be an official act and not considering motives is way too broad a grant of immunity.
This go around was mostly centered on providing Trump a delay so that he could be in office before the next round comes along. The DOJ will do its best to drop it or failing that the court will find some way to protect Trump. However, if they do have to make a rule ruling I think we can safely predict that they will make the immunity very broad promoting the idea of the imperial presidency, while reserving their right to change that should Democrats take over POTUS.
Steve
By removing motivation from analyzing what is official and not official duties, the Republicans on the SC have put their thumb on the scale for Trump. While it isn't the end of democracy, it is a blueprint to allow a lawless president to start dismantling it
This ruling itself does not put an end to democracy, but combined with other developments it could lead to an effective end to democracy. The Supreme Court is apparently prepared to rule in favor of any Republican or Republican action under most circumstances. They have continually pushed the boundaries of partisanship and there is no reason to expect them to stop. MAGA may gain seats in the Senate and House, and they also show no signs of restraint. The Republican Party, which includes the Supreme Court Justices, is determined to seize power by any means.
The whole situation is different from what it was in Nixon's time or even Iran-Contra. The Court was a restraint on Nixon; now it is an enabler of Trump.
I rarely disagree with Kevin, but I do this time. The pardon power is the big red button that frees a corrupt president to do virtually anything, and that is in the 1st bucket of "core" constitutional powers. He can order any underling to carry out any act, no matter how vile or illegal, with the backstop of a pardon.
The 2nd bucket contains acts on the "outer perimeter" -- whatever the fuck that means -- of the president's authority, which must be "presumed" as official until a court finds otherwise (which will then be appealed and remanded and appealed and remanded at infinitum). What AG is going to bog down his DOJ with such hopeless and politically fraught exercises, knowing that the defendant might die of old age (or get re-elected) before a trial can occur?
The 3rd bucket is "non-official" acts, for which the president is *not* immune. But what are those? Virtually nothing, as long as the president can create a pretext to make it "presumptively official." As long he is sitting in the Oval Office when he does it, or manufactures some pseudo-official framework for it, *nothing* will count as "non-official." We already have learned that even the Manhattan conviction is being challenged. How in the HELL can that be, given that the Stormy Daniels incident and the following cover-up was all done *before* he was president? Answer: he signed some of the reimbursement checks to Michael Cohen *while in the Oval Office*! So now, far from that fact being even more odious, it opens the door to him claiming that it could have been "presumptively official," under some bullshit story such as "protecting the reputation of the Office of the President." Watch in horror as the SCOTUS overturns that conviction in the near future.
No, Kevin, this sure looks like absolute immunity to me. While you are very good at ferreting out over-the-top fear-mongering in so many cases, I think you got it wrong this time. It quacks like a duck.
He is still bound by all the normal rules of democracy.
Sure, what if he says no?
By the ruling's logic, if Trump were to make an Oval Office address to the nation wherein he did a bunch of illegal things as plainly as he did on January 6, he'd be doing so in an official capacity and therefore be immune from any liability, civil or criminal.
"In an official capacity"
That's the rub, isn't it? Sure, try proving that it *wasn't*, buddy. Also, too, future Trumpian presidents will simply issue themselves and their administration blanket pardons to cover all their bases. Is that illegal? Who cares! Issuing pardons is something Presidents do in their official capacity all the time, so wev. And again, how can you ever impeach a president for "high crimes and misdemeanors" committed while in office when, by definition, the president cannot commit any crimes *as president*? Can't impeach him for anything. Can't prosecute him afterwards for anything.
If it looks like an unaccountable monarch, and quacks like an unaccountable monarch, then yeah, what you have yourself there is an unaccountable monarch.
"High crimes" does not necessarily mean violations of existing criminal law. For instance, Bush lied to Congress and the country in order to get his war in Iraq. That may or may not be a violation of some criminal statute but if Congress had decided to impeach him for it, there would have been no issue with conceptualizing Bush's conduct as a "high crime" without worrying about whether it breached any particular statute.
In any case, SCOTUS didn't say the president can't commit crimes; it said the president can commit crimes but can't be prosecuted for them. Further, it's extremely clear that if a president is impeached, convicted, and removed from office, he CAN then be prosecuted for the conduct he was impeached for. This judgment has not overruled that section of the Constitution. Indeed, effectively SCOTUS has accepted Trump's (really, really stupid) argument that a president has to be impeached and convicted before he can be prosecuted.
No, the majority said the President has absolute immunity for 'actions within his [sic] conclusive and preclusive Constitutional authority', and presumptive immunity for all official acts. Impeachment was not raised, except in the section that rejects Trump's much broader claim of absolute immunity.
Nevertheless, the majority's position precludes criminal prosecution of the first category of acts, whether or not the President is impeached and convicted.
Agree on "high crimes"-- in that context, they're crimes of state, against the proper order and function of government, and have really no necessary reference to criminal law. A little broader than what we'd generally call "political crimes" but that term is in the right direction. Treason, the first in the constitutional sequence on impeachment, is obvious; bribery means essentially prostituting public authority for venal and direct private gain, also a crime of state.
And by sheer and mere coincidence, bribery too has just been made much harder to charge and harder to convict on by this very court. What does Poirot say about things like this, "it gives one furiously to think"?
>>But it's not the end of democracy.<<
It is not the end of Democracy in the hands of Joe Biden. It is the end of Democracy in the hands of Donald Trump. That’s not an exaggeration. Listen to what he and his surrogates say they will do. Besides, to those who are watching, Trump routinely stretches laws to their limits and beyond. Why would this be different? Who would stop him?
Exactly. This decision is dangerous not only in the power to avoid prosecution it gives a rogue president, but also in the power it gives the courts to decide what is and isn't an official act. There are lots of reasons why otherwise sober legal analysts are "hair on fire" about this decision. It opens a broad path for all kinds of abuse both by an authoritarian president like a second-term Trump and a highly partisan Supreme Court like the one we have now.
Kevin will shocked and appalled when the courts rule anything a Republican does is "official" and anything a Dem does is not.
This is beyond insane. The overall point about the dangers of declaring everything a threat to democracy is well taken, but everything else is just wrong or grossly misleading.
--First, the point that it's being "sent back to the lower court" is a red herring. That's just a description of the Supreme Court being an appellate court, not a trial court (save for the rare original jurisdiction cases). It doesn't make findings of fact, but rather sets the standards by which lower courts interpret findings of fact. Unless they had bought into Trump's insane total immunity theory, the lower court would still have a role to play (and even in that case, procedurally, if not substantively, it still would be the one to dismiss the case, not the Supreme Court).
--U.S. presidents have done a lot of bad and corrupt things in the past. But, none had directly attacked the basic election process in the way Trump did on Jan 6, and no the various examples people might try to cite don't come close.
--Yes, literally, the Supreme Court did not immunize the President for everything. What they did do was provide an extremely difficult to overcome presumption of immunity for official duties and an absolute immunity for the purported "core" immunities. And, as the decision repeatedly emphasized via example, the President deserves the benefit of the doubt if it's a close call.
--The CEO comparison is just bizarre. First, people do like to compare them to aristocracy, but more importantly...CEOs get put in jail all time. Maybe not as much as they should or people would like, but it's just a total non sequitur when compared to absolute immunity for core functions.
--Actions that might end democracy would already have been inappropriate before Chevron was overruled. There are things around the margins maybe relating to regulations regarding law enforcement, but on the whole it's again mostly a non sequitur.
--This gets to your previous post, but criminal immunity for the executive is completely different from parliamentary immunity. Pretty much every country has some form of parliamentary immunity and yes, some countries do have absolute parliamentary immunity, which the organization your list was from is not a fan of. But the point of that is to give the legislature absolute protection from a potential dictator that would try to use pliant prosecutors to charge members of congress with horrible crimes and then have a weak justice system convict them. That is not comparable to absolute immunity for a portion of executive functions.
Finally, on South Korea, they've imprisoned a bunch of their presidents and...the country is doing fine? And, given that they were just coming off of decades of dictatorship it's not surprising they'd prefer to be on the side of being less, not more, deferential to the purported exalted status of the leader.
In general, it's a simple question--does the president have kingly/sacred powers? And the Supreme Court has said yes--his "core" powers are so elevated that his use of those powers stands is above the law. Whatever utilitarian concerns you might have about back-and-forth lawfare, the Supreme Court has gone far, far beyond anything that has ever been ruled in American history.
And who decides, ultimately, what counts as an official act, and what does not. Yep, that's right, the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court. My hair is on fire because six people decided to apply a little napalm.
What they've basically said, as far as I understand it, is that a gangster-minded president can use the core powers of the presidency without any fear of getting prosecuted for actions that would subject anyone else to criminal penalties, and can use an undefined range of penumbral powers with only some small, yet to be determined, exposure to criminal penalties (yes, they're back in the penumbra business).
We've had precisely one individual in the office who's demonstrated the intention and moral capacity to take advantage of that license (several have verged on that in one or two specific areas, but only one who's full-spectrum on this). Sadly for us, he's a candidate to hold the office again, and with a credible chance of getting back into it. He's the very same person on whose case the court made this unhinged ruling, with its yet-to-be-defined scope and terms (a very typical Roberts performance, setting up vague "rules" for the court to define later, over and over).
There's one big reason why they left all the terms so open, I think, and that's so they can control the prosecution at every step of the way and in almost all its dimensions. They are protecting the past lawless behavior of trump with their own lawless ruling this week, and more lawless rulings on this case to come.
Implications of this ruling are what scare people. If criminal law doesn't apply during a presidential term, what other law applies? Administrative procedures are defined by non-criminal statute. Executive departments are created by non-criminal statute (and they act under a president's authority and ultimately at a president's direction). Federal contracts are issued according to non-criminal law. Federal funds are appropriated by non-criminal acts of Congress.
Is the president bound to follow these non-criminal statutes? A gangster-minded president now knows going in that he can ignore the criminal ones, so what will hold that president to the non-criminal ones? Would he even care? Would he need to care? Do we really think a republican House would impeach a republican president, and republican senators convict, no matter how egregious the deviation?
This is about trump, for sure, and the obvious rejoinder is to say don't elect him. Sure, we're almost all committed to that here. But the court has handed him or anyone like him a very wide license to do anything and everything their felonious and peculous and arbitrary little hearts desire and be covered for it.
And every candidate going forward will have to affirm "I am not a crook." Yes, for Roberts and most of these guys it goes back to Nixon. But that's a story for another post.
Re: Watergate... I don't think it even becomes a scandal in a post Trump v. US world. Nixon just tells Mitchell that the DOJ needs to stop wasting valuable time looking further into the third rate burglary and that's that. No need to launder the order through the CIA, which they did back then because they all knew this shit was hella illegal and could land them in jail.
Yeah, and I think he could even have told Mitchell exactly why he was ordering him to drop the investigation, under this ruling. Nothing in their conversations would ever be admissible in any hypothetical investigation or trial, and nothing about Nixon's motivation would be germane or could be used in investigation or trial. In fact I don't see where anything in the Nixon tapes would be admissible at all in any investigation or prosecution, even if they all became public somehow. The only possible opening would be Congress's ability to investigate and publish that kind of information, and if it came up before this court, these guys would find a way to kill even that.
So much of this is all about Nixon and the loyalists who signed on when he said "if the president does it, that means it isn't illegal."
You're half-right. This is the ruling that enables the end of democracy. The other half of the paradigm shift is the election of Trump -- a man who sees himself king -- which will complete the deed.
Not quite yet the Russian Court, SCOTUS has come to believe that, of all the actions of all three branches of the government, it is the final arbiter of what it can and can't review, and what is the meaning of words including those used literally in the Constitution.
What Roberts, and by extension Kavanaugh and Barrett, don't quite see, is that they're replaceable like Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor. Either you serve Trump or you're gone. It won't be long before a Trumpian presidency replaces them against their will and SCOTUS is ostensibly an independent branch but actually a rubber stamping facility.
Maybe yes maybe no. But what does the Supreme Court waiting until the last possible day to release their opinion tell you about their motivation and ethics?
They undoubtedly made the decisions on their ruling many months ago—with the totally compromised Thomas and only a little less compromised Alito participating.
Democracy isn't an all or nothing thing. Maybe it isn't the end but it's sure a huge step in the wrong direction.
I think if presidents were criminally liable for murder, I'd have noticed by now. I concur with some comments above: Scotus is just winning time for Trump, for him personally, just as it awarded the presidency to Bush in 2000, with the gall to even write in its decision that it should not be seen as a precedent for similar cases in the future. The Supreme Court is part of the GOP apparatus, that's all. Is that the end of democracy? Well, um...
Shorter SCOTUS: "If the President does it, it's not illegal."
Amended : "If the President does it, we get to decide whether or not it's legal."
This is how democracy dies, not with a bang, but with a shrug.
Dont worry, it will all be fine. The courts will figure this out, dont worry. Oh, CEOs get away with things! Shrug.
Goodness, what a disaster of a post.
Yes it does, and we even know the exact date of death for American democracy: January 20th, 2025. And if Trump doesn’t win (looking more likely by the day that he will win) we’ll always be from now on one Presidential election away from the death of democracy. There are no sane Republicans left.
But, her emails.
Damn right it’s not over.
It’s now more likely than not to get much, much worse.
I'll just post the link here to Josh Marshall's column on this, who, as it happens, has an Ivy League Ph.D in early US History, so he sort of knows what he's talking about here.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/scotus-18th-century-kings-and-the-dangers-of-an-unbound-presidency
This was a big, very bad, no good, terrible ruling.
Josh is exactly right (my field too), but his language is more temperate than I'd use. The people who wrote this constitution, and the people who debated it and voted in the state conventions to adopt it, are all spinning furiously in their graves at this abortion of a ruling. It's a jump through the looking glass, where up is down and down is up, that could only have been written by people who have not the foggiest notion what the constitution was actually written to accomplish and to prevent.
Rachel Barkow pointed out in a podcast that most of this court has a background in the Office of Legal Counsel or as some other kind of administration functionary. And this majority in particular seems to be the benighted progeny of the rage of Edwin Meese and other contemporaries that Nixon wasn't allowed to act on his merest whim, as if this country was the kind of Ruritanian satrapy that those proposed White House guards' uniforms would have signified. "Jurisprudence of original understanding" my rosy red arse.
Thanks for the link
Lady Justice is a harlot
eager to open
The Honeypot...
The Fabulous Lambpit
to any perverted billionaire
who wishes to sample
Her
venereal
wares
If you cut a rose, what happens?
Do you think this ruling will make things progressively better or worse?
It's a terrible ruling which directly negates provisions of the Constitution. Bribery, per McDonnell v. United States can only be charged for an 'official act', which the Court stated did not include merely calling another public official. Bribery is of course one of the 'high crimes' specifically called out in Article 2, Section 4 as a grounds for impeachment. Per Article 1, Section 3,an impeached individual is still criminally liable. Despite this, the Court has declared official acts of Presidents pursuant to the Constitution have absolute immunity. You cannot reconcile these.
We have a Supreme Court that does not respect precedent, or stare decisis or the plain text of the Constitution. This is absolutely furthering the end of democracy.
This is the most Pollyanna-ish post in Kevin's storied Pollyanna post history.
"He is still bound by all the normal rules of democracy."
Trump: "Military show trials for all the people who opposed me."
Is there another edge to the sword of Presidential immunity?
Even if a President can’t be prosecuted for crimes committed during “official” activities, surely anybody else involved in those same crimes can be.
For example, let’s say some future President conspires with a minor Justice Department official to overthrow an election she just lost. Per SCOTUS, the President is free and clear but I suspect the Justice Department dude could be indicted and tried as a co-conspirator.
Alternatively, assume some miscreant sends a big bribe to this very same future President who then, in exchange, proceeds to pardon this very same miscreant at the end of her term. The bribee’s immune but the briber has also committed a crime so they can be indicted and convicted for that crime too.
In each case, the President is immune so can’t incriminate herself no matter what she says – so she can’t take the 5th if put on the witness stand. Indeed, given her immunity, can she not be compelled to testify? If she refuses, isn’t that contempt of court and, like many journalists that have been jailed for refusing to reveal their sources, might that bring fines or some time in jail until she does testify? And if she eventually does testify, even tho no penalties accrue might she not then stand convicted by her own words at least in the eyes of the public?
I can see 2 potential escapes – claims of executive privilege or peremptory pardons before term end given to the briber for his bribery and to the JD dude for his part in the election interference conspiracy. Might need some additional laws to close these loop holes.
IANAL – any legal eagles out there wanna chime in?
The Supreme Court did not "overreach." It unilaterally amended the Constitution, seized control of all public policy, and revoked century old precedents as if they were waste paper. Do you seriously think they're going to stop here?
Some rebuttals:
You have a pollyanna view that the Supreme Court will scale anything back. Their actions over the last year pretty clearly are aimed at making sure Trump is elected. Once they've taken that step, they cannot step back.
The court actually did immunize Trump from every possible criminal infraction. You should listen to Ken White's analysis on Serious Trouble. Let's take the Georgia matter as an example. Trump called Brad Raffensberger to get him to overturn the election results here. The Supreme Court's decision says that calling state officials is clearly an official act by the president and you therefore cannot inquire into the reasons for that call or what was said during it.
If Trump accepts a bribe to perform an official act, what makes you think that isn't covered by immunity? Especially if he actually receives the money after the act, which the court declared just last week counts as a gratuity and cannot be a bribe.
Trump has laready mused about a third term. He has said outright that the Constitution should be terminated for him. IF he decides not to leave, who will stop him? Your assertion that he still has to work with Congress is only true for as long as Congress is in Democratic hands.
The fact that presidents are not held accountable for criminal actions has no bearing whatsoever on whether they should be immune from accountability. It is rather a failure of our political system that their successors want to move on rather than fulfill their oath to enforce the law. That bullet point is ridiculous.
Quite a lot of people suggest that CEOs are modern nobility. Where have you been hanging out?
The question you have to ask yourself is if, looking at the 6 justices, you see any evidence that any of them would reconsider tipping the election or protecting Trump as he commits crimes. Thje evidence so far shouts pretty strongly no. It is more likely that this is just the start. The main things this decision accomplishes is to sideline states by federalizing all prosecutions involving presidents, and to kick the can up and down the appellate process for a while, to get safely past the election.
At that point, all bets are off. These guys are Republicans. I haven't seen a Republican place country over party since John McCain. They are all Republicans first, the welfare of the country being a distant second if it is on the radar at all. There are 5 3/4 true Republicans on the court and they follow the party line: do whatever is possible to accrue power and keep it. And if that means turning on a dime, who cares? After all, 5 of those 6 justices declared in their confirmation hearings that no one is above the law. The only one who didn't was Thomas, who was not asked. You can now see how long that belief lasted -- right to the point where it stood in the way of accruing more power. Then it went down the memory hole, and Roberts made the extremely arrogant, smug and conceited assertion that the three liberal women were just "hysterical."
After the last two terms, I put nothing beyond this court. You are right on one point: it is not in itself the end of democracy. But it was intended to hand power to a man who clearly wants to end it. Four years of Trump will be terminal in a lot of ways, The way that doesn't get mentioned but should all day every day is that it puts limiting climate change to 2C beyond reach. Turning the US into Russia is a paltry thing compared to that.
Ken White is a former US Attorney and current criminal defense and first amendment lawyer. He calls this decision "catastrophic." And he does not have a history of being alarmist. You should listen to an expert before playing one on the web.
https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/donald-trump-wins-the-immunity-idol
I concur, very well said.
In addition to Ken "Popehat" White, I'd also suggest that Kevin check Ben Wittes over at Lawfare (and on Tuesday's Bulwark podcast). Wittes supported Kavanaugh's nomination and I think thought well of Barrett's too. He's no raving knee-jerk liberal-- in fact I don't know if he's even a liberal at all, honestly. Up to this week he's been sanguine about the court; like Kevin he'd accepted the idea that despite any conclusions partisans want to draw, all but one or two of the justices have been operating in good faith. He's not that way now, and if his hair isn't on fire that's because he's tearing it out https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-decision-of-surpassing-recklessness-in-dangerous-times
These people in the court majority are not honest actors.
ben wittes is an oberlin alum. ipso facto, a liberal.
So what? And by the way, defining someone by where they went to college is idiotic. Giuliani went to NYU. Hannity went to University of California at Santa Cruz. Does that make them liberals? Do you know what the term "ad hominem" means, or did they not cover that where you went to school?
Ken's summary:
"...the Court’s gesture toward possibly allowing some prosecutions in the future is illusory. The undefined and seemingly open-ended category of “core functions” that enjoy absolute immunity; the broad and ill-defined category of “official acts” that enjoy at least a presumption of immunity and possibly full immunity; the prohibition on considering motive behind official acts; and the prohibition on using official acts as evidence of intent or knowledge — they all combine to mean that the next president (which very well may be Donald Trump) can break criminal laws at will. With the current Congress, impeachment is almost certainly impossible, and now criminal consequences are off the table. So, great."
It wouldn't be the end of democracy if our political culture weeded out presidential aspirants who themselves despise democratic norms. But such a description no longer characters US political culture. The odds-on favorite to be our next president possesses deeply authoritarian impulses and an utter contempt for democracy. He'll avail himself of this ruling.
The most immediate result of this decision is that these six people will be micro-managing all aspects of all investigations and prosecutions involving trump, at all levels. That includes what suspected crimes can be investigated, what evidence can be used in any investigation, what charges can be brought, what evidence will be allowed at trial (if allowed to be held), whose testimony will be allowed at trial (if allowed to be held), and after any trial, whether their strictures have been conformed with, whether any verdict except acquittal is a legitimate one, and whether any sentence handed down is appropriate.
In other words, the opacity of the "guidelines" is a feature, not a bug. This decision is a John Roberts Special, substituting for usable clarity a raft of uncertainties that other courts will have to break their heads over but that only he and his court can resolve. Roberts has set this up so they will need to supervise absolutely every comma from this point forward.
And a very happy 4th to us all
Kevin,
Thanks for posting the report. But I think you are overlooking the differences between limited and absolute immunity and are underplaying the amount of power SCOTUS just gave POTUS.
And to quote the report you posted:
"Immunity, when applied to corruption
cases, essentially minimises the cost to almost zero,
therefore always yielding a net gain in the cost-benefit
analysis of engaging in corruption.
Indeed, the UNODC states that investigations into high-
level corruption may be significantly impeded by public
officials invoking their political immunity. For this
reason, the UNODC claims, it is not unusual for
immunity from prosecution to be perceived as the main
cause for increased corruption levels (UNODC 2009)."
I cannot help but think the Donald Trump or a similary authoritarian-minded, self-centered president won't use this ruling to engage in high-level corruption knowing that he or she will not be prosecuted.
So, end of democracy? No. A keep piece of the authoritarian puzzle? Absolutely.