Opinion: Supreme Court ruling on president immunity is extremist, not conservative action
In December 1962, with the nation’s survival in doubt, President Lincoln advised Congress that “the dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.”
That’s true today about the language of the quiet past.
I’m speaking of the misuse of the noun and adjective “conservative.”
No conservatives, in the old and true meaning, could do what the John Roberts Supreme Court has done to our Constitution and our country. Or what Donald Trump attempted after he lost the 2020 election.
Only radical extremists could do such subversive things. Betraying what the Revolution won and what the Founding Fathers validated in 1787, the Supreme Court has distorted the presidency into a nearly absolute monarchy. Not one word in the Constitution implies any criminal immunity, whether “presumptive” or otherwise, for anything a president does. To the contrary, it provides that officials subject to impeachment are also liable — without exception — to “indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”
The six radically extremist justices in the majority — three of whom Trump appointed — had to grasp their rationale out of thin air to give him, and any future president, a stay-out-of-jail-free card no matter how gross the crime.
Read literally, the decision really does mean that a president could order a rival murdered in the guise of national security. It would have absolved Richard Nixon of the Watergate coverup.
Trump’s scheming that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021 was the moral equivalent of treason — but he’s close to getting away with it. By delaying its decision to the last moment, the court prevented his trial on any of the federal charges before the Nov. 5 election. If he wins, he would then fire the special counsel and order the Justice Department to dismiss the charges.
The majority ordered the lower courts to distinguish between his “unofficial” acts and his “official” ones, as if there were a bright line of difference.
Even Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who concurred with only some of it, cautioned that the court “leaves open the possibility that the Constitution forbids prosecuting the president for any official conduct …” Having said that, she should have dissented to all of it.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her impassioned dissent, the majority decision “reshapes the institution of the presidency” and “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.”
Real conservatives used to be fond of quoting Lord Acton’s maxim that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We haven’t heard much about that lately. John Roberts has given future presidents a stay-out-of-jail-free card to accept bribes for making appointments, granting pardons, signing or vetoing bills and any other form of graft.
Trump v. United States needs to be seen in a larger context — that of the court’s prevailing, pre-existing pattern of institutionalizing the power and influence of the presidency and private interests. The Citizens United decision was radically extremist. The repeal of reproductive rights that had protected two generations of American women was radically extremist.
The Trump decision is one of the worst the court has ever issued, alone with the 1857 Dred Scott decision that protected slavery and brought on the Civil War, and Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, which condemned Blacks to 80 years of Jim Crow.
The Founders conceptualized the judiciary as the weakest of the branches of government but it has become the least accountable. Amending the Constitution to overturn evil decisions is an imperfect remedy because it is so arduous. Impeachment would be swifter — and Roberts and his gang deserve it — but that does not appear to be feasible politically.
The Founders believed that life tenure for federal judges would protect them from political influence. But the problem now is how to protect the people from the extremist, irresponsible, unaccountable, politically influenced, intellectually corrupt and radically extremist justices of the Supreme Court.
Term limits, which I hope President Biden is at last ready to propose, is one approach that most citizens would support.
However that plays out, remember that “conservative” is one thing the Supreme Court majority is not. And consider wisely which candidate to trust with the impunity of a king.
Martin Dyckman retired as an associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times and is a freelance editorial writer. He lives in Woodfin.
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This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: John Roberts Supreme Court immunity ruling is radical extremism
