Photo: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
US Supreme Court justices 2022
By doing everything possible to sabotage Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution before November’s presidential election, the MAGA justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are putting themselves on the ballot along with Trump.
It doesn’t matter that the court ultimately will strike down Trump’s preposterous claim he had absolute immunity to commit as many as he wanted as president when he tried to overthrow President Biden’s election by creating the violent mob of insurrectionists attacking Congress.
There’s not a shred of evidence in the Constitution supporting absolute presidential immunity because it has never existed. But the six rightwing Supreme Court justices, three appointed by Trump, are doing everything they can to support Trump without being disowned by their fancy law schools.
They are brazenly moving in slow motion to pretend there are legal questions left to consider after federal Judge Tanya Chutkan and a unanimous decision by the D.C. Appeals Court have already demolished every absurd argument from Trump’s attorneys.
Slow Walking Justice
What legal questions could be left after the bipartisan panel of Appeals Court judges has explicitly outlined the worst possible consequences of Trump’s nonsensical legal theory including protecting Trump from prosecution if he ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate Biden or openly sold top-secret documents to foreign adversaries and pardons to criminals out of the Oval Office?
The deadly SEAL Team 6 example wasn’t all that much of a stretch from the violent insurrection we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters rampaged through the Capitol leading to a half dozen deaths and injuries to 140 police officers including brain damage to many of them beaten unconscious with flagpoles and other clubs.
The closest the insurrectionists came to a real-life political assassination was nearly catching Vice President Pence and his family in a Capitol hallway after Trump sent out a tweet to the rioters accusing Pence of betraying the angry mob by refusing to replace the electoral votes Biden won in seven states with fake Trump electors.
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Trump’s trial before Judge Chutkan on special prosecutor Jack Smith’s criminal indictment of the former president for his actions to overthrow the 2020 election was scheduled to begin today. When the Appeals Court rejected Trump’s groundless claim of presidential immunity, it set a tight deadline of Feb. 12 for Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court so Chutkan could resume her trial as quickly as possible.
Dragging Out
As expected, Trump took as long as he could before filing his appeal on Feb. 12. That’s when the court’s MAGA majority resumed its own delays to help Trump avoid prosecution for trying to overthrow the last presidential election to give Republicans another chance to elect Trump in November so he can sabotage his own prosecution. Just before Christmas, the court refused Jack Smith’s emergency appeal to fast-track consideration of Trump’s unconstitutional claim of presidential immunity without waiting for the Appeals Court decision. After the holidays, it took the Appeals Court about a month to throw out Trump’s fraudulent claim of immunity because it was an open-and-shut case without any evidence submitted by Trump’s attorneys to support it.
When Trump filed his Supreme Court appeal on Feb. 12 requesting a continued stay in his trial, the Supreme Court did nothing at all for more than two weeks. The rumor among court experts was the majority might have denied the stay and Samuel Alito was writing his angry dissent.
That overestimated the court’s respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. On Wednesday, the court not only extended the stay on Trump’s prosecution until its decision, but it delayed oral arguments for nearly two months until April 22, one of last days it will hear arguments on any cases this term.
The court is clearly doing Trump’s dirty work by intentionally delaying their decision for as long as possible to make it as difficult as they can for all the damning testimony from Pence and other Republican witnesses to Trump’s attempt to overthrow democracy to take place before the next presidential election. It’s incredibly shortsighted for the Supreme Court to be so clearly in the bag supporting Trump’s presidential candidacy since Trump has no intention of obeying any Supreme Court decisions he doesn’t like if he’s elected again.
Crimes Against Democracy
For the rest of us who have waited four years for Trump to be prosecuted for his crimes against democracy, we have to stop Trump and his MAGA Supreme Court from destroying the fundamental principle of justice in America that no one is above the law.
Trump tried to prevent millions of our votes from being counted, but he failed. We need to keep turning out in record numbers to elect presidents who will appoint justices protecting constitutional rights instead of destroying them.
Democracy’s worst nightmare would be electing a criminal president who would appoint 30-year-old replacements when Alito and Clarence Thomas retire to continue abolishing constitutional rights for the next 50 years.
