America is in sensory overload right now and it’s only a question of time before we collectively stop moving and just start banging our heads on the floor, while screaming “Enough!” The reason? Of course it’s Donald Trump. Right now we have two unprecedented court hearings taking place simultaneously, one in New York City and the other at the Supreme Court. The New York hearing is to decide whether a candidate for president (in 2016 and now) committed a felony(ies) by cooking the books and mischaracterizing hush money payments as legal fees and other things. So far it looks like the answer is “yes” since David Pecker went out of his way to state that Trump was concealing the money trail out of concern for his election and not his family, particularly his wife.
Then we’ve got the SCOTUS hearing. I guess it’s part of the divine comedy that we all live in nowadays that Trump’s lawyer has the voice of a classic demon. Or, maybe he just sounds like RFK, Jr. and Junior sounds like a demon. In any event, the lawyer and one of the justices had this conversation and the fact of them even having it, let alone the substance of what they discuss, is a mind altering proposition. Yet today, April 25, 2024, it’s just another news story along with the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the upcoming presidential election, the Gross Domestic Product, climate change and all the rest. Maybe you need to be in a certain age bracket to realize how abnormal all this is.
The fact that we're debating before the Supreme Court whether a president can be a dictator speaks to how dangerous and dark a path Donald Trump has lead America down. In November we must decide if we continue down it. pic.twitter.com/sPBD07xDUP
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 25, 2024
These conversations are insane on their face. But at least so far as oral arguments have progressed, it appears that the Justices do not favor the blanket immunity Trump demands. That’s something to be grateful for.
“There is no perfect system,” assistant special counsel Michael Dreeben told the high court as he argued for them to allow the prosecution of Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, to proceed. He faces four felony counts for allegedly trying to block Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
Dreeben told the justices the current legal system “works pretty well.” It may need some fine tuning in the form of whatever ruling the court makes, he said, but not “the radical proposal” offered by Trump’s lawyer — that Trump, and all presidents, operate with broad protection from criminal prosecution.
“I agree,” said Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee.
There’s a shocker, but that’s a quote from the Washington Post. Plus Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch want you to know they’re not thinking about Trump at all, they’re thinking about presidents yet to come. Still and all, things didn’t go as far south as feared that they would.
The three liberal justices also focused much of their attention on the future implications of an immunity ruling — but they worried most that granting Trump protection in this case would subvert the very premise of the founding of the United States, to escape the tyranny of kings.
“The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to,” said Justice Elana Kagan. “They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not supposed to be above the law?”
Trump lawyer John Sauer said the Constitution was designed to build “checks on the presidency,” and did not describe a format for criminal prosecution of a president.
While the conservatives fretted that ruling against Trump would create a permanently hobbled presidency, the liberals fretted that giving him significant immunity would encourage a new kind of criminal presidency without consequence.
Again, there’s a forest and trees issue that seems to be lost here, and that is that this republic has hummed along for two and a half centuries and done quite well without needing to focus attention on the concept of presidential immunity, or even think about it. The only reason we’re having this definitional conversation now is because a bona fide crook managed to persuade the electorate that he was somebody else altogether and get into power.
It will be interesting to see what SCOTUS concludes. And it may be a fact that SCOTUS won’t conclude anything until June and perhaps Trump’s January 6 trial will be delayed post-election, which is what he wants. Careful what you wish for, Donald. I believe that Trump will lose the election and then the trials that do take place post-election will be solely focused on Citizen Trump and not on Candidate Trump.
Citizen Trump might just get his ass kicked worse than Candidate Trump, if the January 6 trial is held after the election. I think that’s a good possibility. Trump is currently playing his candidacy for all that it’s worth and claiming that the only reason he’s in trial is because he’s a candidate. But he can’t make that statement post-election. No, any legal trials Trump finds himself in at that time will be because he is credibly accused of breaking the law and the time for judgment has come.
But again, the fact that we are even having these discussions, pondering these considerations, is only more proof of how abysmally down the rabbit hole a broken GOP and its ludicrous, immoral standard bearer have led us. When and if this country ever goes back to a pre-Trump *normalcy* I could not even begin to tell you.
I think not. My theory has been all along that we’re like a jar of pickles. They don’t ever go back to being cucumbers. A permanent cultural rift has been wrought in this country.
As far as the immunity “question”…….
…..but at what point does removal for “high crimes and misdemeanors” enter the conversation???
“TRUMP LAWYER JOHN SAUER SAID THE CONSTITUTION WAS DESIGNED TO BUILD “CHECKS ON THE PRESIDENCY,” AND DID NOT DESCRIBE A FORMAT FOR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION OF A PRESIDENT.”
There is a reason for that. He is to be prosecuted in the same way as any other citizen.
We don’t have a separate format for prosecuting a butcher, or a baker.
My theory has been all along that we’re like a jar of pickles. They don’t ever go back to being cucumbers.
Pickles never go back to being cucumbers, but I look at it a different way. The pickles have always been there. They just didn’t have the benefit of an a-hole like Trump wrecking the country while “cult” ivating them to be “my pretties.” But think about it — they did pretty well for themselves back in the 1950s, when Joe McCarthy and Trump’s guru (small world isn’t it) Roy Cohen had the country in a headlock. I think the rest of us have had about enough of this; we need to send them back into the woodwork.
bunch of gangsters!
Also, “Citizen Trump” won’t have access to donations for legal fees.
SCOTUS needs to be careful here. If they say that presidents should have full immunity and can eliminate political rivals, what’s to stop one from eliminating the supreme court justices, or SCOTUS altogether.