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After watching a president attempting to violently overthrow democracy to remain in office after being defeated for reelection, it’s difficult for Americans to be shocked by anything Republicans will do to corruptly hold onto power these days.
But it’s impossible to overstate how shocking it was for all six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices to support immunity from prosecution for presidents to use their official powers to commit the worst presidential crimes imaginable including assassinating their own political opponents.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor spelled out those horrifying consequences for our democracy in her rational dissent for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“When he (the president) uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Absurd Arguments
None of those descriptions of crimes by a president were made up by Justice Sotomayor. They were variations on actual responses from Trump’s lawyers arguing before the D.C. Appeals Court that presidents should have immunity from prosecution to commit such crimes.
Those absurd arguments in open court were what convinced the Appeals Court judges that Trump was a dangerous lunatic. They unanimously dismissed those grotesque ravings as clear violations of the president’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
When the Supreme Court wasted six more months pretending there were serious legal questions to consider about whether to legalize criminal presidencies, legal experts thought it was just a delaying tactic by unethical Republican justices to prevent Trump from being federally prosecuted for his presidential crimes before the election.
It was far worse than that. Chief Justice John Roberts stopped trying to protect his radical court’s legal reputation. He wrote the outrageous decision for the court’s extreme rightwing supermajority upending the Constitution to grant Trump and any other criminal president “presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.”
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Loaded Gun
Roberts’s harmless sounding euphemism “official acts” did nothing to conceal the fact that his court was intentionally handing Trump a loaded weapon to abolish his own federal criminal indictment for the most violent criminal attempt to overthrow American democracy in history.
We all watched that violent insurrection live on television four years ago when Trump sent his rampaging mob of lawless supporters to the Capitol threatening to murder members of Congress and his own vice president to stop them from certifying Trump’s election defeat by President Biden.
Unbelievably, Roberts’s decision really does suggest as commander-in-chief Trump would also have been immune from prosecution for an “official act” if he’d ordered Seal Team 6 to murder Biden on Jan. 6.
It didn’t happen because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was on high alert that day to prevent Trump from politicizing the military. But if Trump is ever elected president again, he plans to appoint military leaders who will follow his orders, Nuremberg be damned.
Corrupt Court Majority
There’s very little Americans can do immediately about Trump appointing a corrupt supermajority of unindicted criminal co-conspirators to the Supreme Court who are as eager as he is to destroy democracy and the rule of law. Under current law, it could take decades to create a new court majority that will uphold the Constitution again.
The first job this year is to prevent Trump from regaining power again to appoint more corrupt judges. That just got more challenging for Democrats, but they have to resolve their differences quickly to create the strongest possible presidential campaign to defeat Trump.
Wisconsin is a model for the nation in steadily winning state elections to throw off 15 years of political corruption on its state Supreme Court. Defeating democracy destroying MAGA Republicans in the House and Senate in state elections is the only way to restore support for democracy on the Supreme Court.
The corrupt MAGA Supreme Court supermajority has already set up the next battle between medical health care professionals and rightwing hate groups by agreeing to review a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender teenagers.
About two dozen rightwing Republican state legislatures have banned gender-transitioning health care for adolescents despite dire warning from major medical associations about spiraling rates clinical depression and suicide among teenagers. Parents of more than 100,000 transgender adolescents in those states who love and support their children have to decide whether to abandon their homes, jobs and communities to get necessary health care for their kids.
MAGA Republicans like to kill stuff. Kill constitutional rights. Kill democracy for people they don’t like. Now they’re killing teenagers over pronouns.
From now on, every state and national election will be about permanently protecting democracy for all Americans. Despite what you may have heard, the overwhelming majority of Americans support democracy.
