The Trump immunity ruling: a licence to break the law?

What timing, said The Star-Ledger. Just as America prepared to celebrate 4 July – the commemoration of winning independence from the British crown – the supreme court decided to "restore the monarchy". By a 6-3 majority, it upheld Donald Trump's contention that a president has immunity from prosecution for acts that fall within the undefined category of "official" conduct. The case related to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election result; justices left it to lower courts to determine whether his acts were "official" or not, but directed them to interpret the scope broadly. By way of illustration, the court claimed that a presumption of immunity should apply to Trump's strong-arming of the then-vice-president Mike Pence to ignore the results of the electoral college decision. One of the dissenting justices, Sonia Sotomayor, complained that the ruling effectively makes the president "a king above the law", enabling him to get away with, say, ordering the assassination of a rival. 

This is an appalling ruling, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon was brought down by the Watergate scandal, a case that gave the lie to Nixon's infamous claim that "when the president does it, that means that is it not illegal". The court has now effectively affirmed Nixon's claim. We already had reason enough to fear a second Trump term, given his contempt for the law and his vengeful instincts. Only last week, he reposted on social media a call for his Republican critic Liz Cheney to be tried for treason in a televised military tribunal. The new ruling would enable him to "run amok with little fear of criminal accountability". 

The Justice Department provoked this judicial pushback by launching its partisan "lawfare" campaign against Trump, said Jason Willick in The Washington Post. Few dispute that Trump behaved disgracefully after the 2020 election, but this mostly took the form of spouting lies. Without evidence of a clear crime to pin on him, and to link him to the 6 January rioters, prosecutors "threw everything into the indictment they could, even alleging that Trump's threat to remove an acting attorney general was criminal". Such "broad and inchoate charges" invited a rebuttal. The critics' alarm is overblown, agreed Timothy C. Parlatore on CNN. The threat to US politics today is not presidents running amok; it's rival parties descending into a destructive cycle of retaliatory legal warfare. Yes, this ruling might help Trump today, but it will also help protect Joe Biden and future administrations from politically motivated prosecutions. 

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It's true that the immunity ruling doesn't mark "the end of democracy", said The Washington Post. Former presidents could still be punished for official acts that don't relate to their core responsibilities, if prosecutors can convincingly argue that punishment wouldn't hinder a vigorous executive branch. Those who commit misdeeds on the president's behalf will still have to answer to the law. And courts will still have the power to order the executive to halt improper activity. The worry, though, is that this ruling will embolden presidents "to push the boundaries".

In the meantime, it has provided invaluable assistance to Trump's campaign, said Laurence H. Tribe in The New York Times. By taking nearly ten weeks to deliberate and opening the way to a new round of appeals, the supreme court has all but extinguished any chance of a verdict in the 6 January case before November's election. Regardless of whether you think Trump should be acquitted or convicted, "immunity by running out the clock is justice delayed and thus justice denied".