Photo via supremecourt.gov
2022 Roberts Supreme Court
2022 Roberts Supreme Court
It’s no secret former President Trump and rightwing Republican state legal organizations will attempt to throw out millions of legitimately cast American votes in November unless Trump wins so he can shut down his prosecution for trying to overthrow the last election.
Have they forgotten the U.S. Supreme Court and 63 other federal and state courts, many with Trump and other Republican judges, dismissed all those lawsuits by Trump as fraudulent four years ago?
Now the rightwing U.S. Supreme Court supermajority has painted itself into an embarrassing corner. It issued a muddled decision granting immunity from prosecution for crimes Trump committed that were official acts but declared Trump could still be prosecuted for crimes he committed in his role as a presidential candidate.
Without defining the difference between Trump’s official presidential actions and his actions as a presidential candidate, all they did was prevent Trump from being prosecuted before the November election.
Justice Delayed
Trump’s trial for his role in the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, was originally scheduled to be prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith on March 4 before Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan. That would have given a jury plenty of time to reach a verdict long before the presidential election.
But Trump wasn’t interested in a speedy verdict. Neither were his enablers on the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump filed his appeal to the court on the last possible day. The court issued its decision on the final day of the 2024 session declaring there should be new rules on presidential immunity without really clarifying what they should be.
The court wasted months to reach a decision simply to return the case to Chutkan and tell her to hold more hearings to determine whether Trump’s crimes were official presidential acts or the acts of a presidential candidate.
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Trump’s violent mob insurrection on the Congress in the Capitol of the United States to overturn Biden’s election victory over Trump was the worst criminal attempt to overthrow American democracy in history. The political co-conspiracy between Trump and his partisan Supreme Court supermajority to delay the trial until after the next election was a national embarrassment.
Destroying Constitutional Rights
A single-term president should never have the power in our democracy to create a Supreme Court supermajority that can permanently destroy constitutional rights and equality for women that have existed for 50 years and fair elections that count every vote in every state.
The intentionally ambiguous presidential immunity decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts himself dodged and weaved to leave the path open for the court majority to side with either winning presidential candidate in the election lawsuits from the parties that are hurtling toward the court. Voters would have to be fools to count on that from this partisan court if Harris wins, but if we squint hard enough, we can be hopeful.
The last time the Supreme Court issued a partisan ruling on state election practices to determine the outcome of a presidential election, it damaged the legal reputation of the court for decades. It was almost as bad as the current reputation of the court for failure to disclose lavish gifts from billionaire benefactors and conflicts of interests.
In 2000, the case was Bush v. Gore. In dispute were a manual recount of 61,000 ballots voting machines failed to tabulate to determine whether they contained legal votes. Justice Antonin Scalia ultimately won a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court decision halting the recount.
The Florida Ballot Project funded by major national news organizations later that spring revealed if the statewide recount had been completed, Al Gore would have won the most votes and the presidency.
Partisan Decisions
Justice Clarence Thomas is the only current justice still on the court who joined the decision. You know how he voted. But Thomas isn’t the only current justice who was involved in Bush v. Gore. Three more justices—Chief Justice John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—were Republican lawyers fighting on Bush’s behalf.
So how can that possibly be hopeful? The last time those Republican lawyers got involved to swing a presidential election, it left a black mark on the court. Their current court is already riddled with black marks.
They’ve set themselves up to make the final decisions on all the election challenges from the parties this year. We’ve seen Trump’s legal claims before. The current Supreme Court has too. If the current court elects Trump president based on his constant stream of lies about vote fraud, its reputation will be destroyed.
That’s why none of Trump’s rightwing justices wrecked their legal reputations permanently by embracing his evidence-free lawsuits four years ago. All voters supporting Vice President Kamala Harris need to do is turn out the most votes in history for American democracy.
Trump hasn’t discovered any novel new arguments to destroy our voting rights. They’re getting more incoherent all the time.
