{"id":3033,"date":"2024-10-21T01:17:28","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T01:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/supreme-court-says-trump-has-absolute-immunity-for-core-acts-only\/"},"modified":"2024-10-21T01:17:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T01:17:28","slug":"supreme-court-says-trump-has-absolute-immunity-for-core-acts-only","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/supreme-court-says-trump-has-absolute-immunity-for-core-acts-only\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court says Trump has absolute immunity for core acts only"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n The U.S. Supreme Court has found that former President Donald Trump is partially immune from prosecution.
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Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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In a historic, consequential, and controversial decision on Monday, the Supreme Court granted substantial immunity from prosecution to former president Donald Trump on election subversion charges.<\/p>\n

The decision almost certainly will delay his trial until after the November election, if it takes place at all. The vote was 6-to-3, with the court\u2019s Republican appointees all in the majority, and the Democratic appointees in fierce dissent.<\/p>\n

The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, established a broad new immunity from prosecution, not just for Trump, but for past and future presidents, too. Presidents may not be prosecuted for exercising their \u201ccore\u201d constitutional powers, and even in situations where former presidents might be prosecuted after leaving office, they are entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for official actions they took as president.<\/p>\n

Such immunity is needed, said the chief justice, in order to protect an \u201cenergetic,\u201d and \u201cindependent executive,\u201d willing to take \u201cbold\u201d actions and make unpopular decisions when needed. And while Roberts said that private actions by a former president are not protected from prosecution, his opinion seemed to inexorably intertwine private and public actions.<\/p>\n

The court, however, did not itself resolve whether any of the election subversion charges against Trump could go forward; rather, the justices sent the case back to the trial court judge to determine whether any of the charges against Trump are sufficiently private to survive\u2014in other words, not within his official purview as president. And it made it far more difficult to prosecute a former president by limiting the evidence a prosecutor could present.<\/p>\n

In a brief statement to reporters on Monday, President Biden said that today\u2019s Supreme Court decision undermines the rule of law and sets a \u201cdangerous\u201d precedent.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cToday’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what the president can do,\u201d Biden said. \u201cThe power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stuart Gerson, a Republican who served in high-level Justice Department positions, put the effect of Monday\u2019s ruling this way: \u201cIt is impossible that this case will be resolved, if ever, before the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, he said, Trump got what he wanted: delay<\/p>\n

But the former president actually got quite a bit more. The court made clear that if he is re-elected, he will be free to simply order the Justice Department to drop the charges against him<\/a>, and that his pardon power is unlimited.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake,\u201d said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a passionate dissent from bench, \u201cthe majority gives President Trump all he asks for and more. \u2026.Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority\u2019s rule, a president\u2019s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution\u201d under this decision, she said.<\/p>\n

Even the most private and non-official act\u2014like bribery, she said\u2014is insulated because the president is commander in chief, and under the court\u2019s rules laid down Monday, even if bribery charges are brought against a former president, prosecutors could not present evidence of a quid pro quo, she said. The money may have been the quid, but the quo was an official act which presumptively is insulated from prosecution.<\/p>\n

Justice Amy Coney Barrett broke from her fellow conservatives on this important point, siding with the dissenters. \u201cThe Constitution,\u201d she said, \u201cdoes not require blinding juries to the circumstances\u201d of a presidents official, and allegedly illegal, action.<\/p>\n

Many constitutional scholars had expected a split decision in Monday\u2019s case, but few anticipated such a big win for Trump and for Executive power. <\/p>\n

\u201cI just don\u2019t think anyone imagined that they would draw the line in a way that so clearly put a thumb on the scale for a President and for this particular former president,\u201d said NYU law professor Melissa Murray. For instance, she observed, the court seemed to say that any time the President talked to the Vice President, that conversation was presumptively immune from being disclosed to a jury, regardless of how incriminating it may have been.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I were in the Biden administration,\u201d Murray said, \u201cI would be running on this court\u2019s enormous capacity to stoke chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck seemed to second that view.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next president probably gets to pick at least two, if not three, justices. Do we want that to be Donald Trump or want that to be Joe Biden? he asked, adding that \u201cthe court did nothing\u2026to make itself less of an issue in the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe originalists in the room were actually the liberals,\u201d said Yale law professor Akhil Amar, one of the country\u2019s leading constitutional scholars. He was flabbergasted by the decision, which he maintained is contrary to both the history and the text of the constitution.<\/p>\n

Amar said that the court, by barring any consideration of motives in a criminal case against a former president, violated both common sense and the words of the constitution.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t love the criminalization of politics and going after ex-officials, but I think here they really created a Frankenstein, he said. \u201cThere were ways of avoiding that without going nearly so far as they seemed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking for himself alone, took an even more far-reaching position than the court\u2019s other conservatives. He would have held the position of special prosecutor in the Justice Department is unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Justice Sotomayor\u2019s dissent, but wrote separately, accusing the majority of planting \u201cthe seeds of absolute power\u201d for presidents, who until now had been constrained by the law. \u201cIf one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is the law, every man can,\u201d she wrote, in quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, and \u201cit invites anarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Justices Jackson and Sotomayor did not end their dissents, with the usual, \u201cI respectfully dissent.\u201d Instead, they simply said they dissented.<\/p>\n

In other actions Monday, the court dealt another severe blow to the power of government agencies to regulate. The key question in the case, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve<\/em>, was when exactly the clock starts and stops ticking for challenges to government regulations. By a vote of 6-to-3 along ideological lines, the court ruled against the government, and sided with business interests in elongating the period for challenging a final government regulation. <\/p>\n

Previously, the rule was that the six-year statute of limitations began when the regulation became final. But on Monday, the court said that the an injured plaintiff could file a challenge to a final rule at any time he was injured, as long as it is within six years of the injury, not six years of the rule becoming final. <\/p>\n

Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barret found it troubling that under the government\u2019s contrary view, \u201conly those fortunate enough to suffer an injury within six years of a rule\u2019s promulgation\u201d could sue while \u201c[e]veryone else \u2014 no matter how serious the injury or how illegal the rule \u2014 has no recourse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The upshot of the court\u2019s holding is that that businesses, individuals, and corporate entities can challenge federal regulations long after they were initially promulgated and still be within the statute of limitations. That would appear to put on steroids last week\u2019s decision abolishing so-called Chevron deference, which for 40 years deferred to reasonable agency regulations when a law is ambiguous. <\/p>\n

Writing in dissent for the court\u2019s three liberals, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that by further opening the floodgates of litigation, Monday\u2019s ruling will increase the destabilizing effects of the court\u2019s decision last week to overturn the Chevron precedent.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of a momentous Term, this much is clear,\u201d Jackson wrote. \u201cThe tsunami of lawsuits against agencies\u201d authorized by last week\u2019s decision and this one have \u201cthe potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in a third major decision, the court declined to issue a final ruling in a set of major cases that challenged whether social media platforms, like newspapers and TV and radio networks, have a First Amendment right to decide what material to put on their platforms. <\/p>\n

By a unanimous vote, the court instead voided two lower court decisions and sent the cases back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Eleventh Circuit for further proceedings commensurate with the high court\u2019s instructions.<\/p>\n

Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan said that \u201cthere is much work to do below on both these cases\u201d and importantly, at the same time, she signaled that social media companies do have First Amendment rights to moderate content. \u201cThe editorial judgments influencing the content of\u201d Facebook\u2019s NewsFeed and YouTube\u2019s homepage are \u201cprotected expressive activity,\u201d said Kagan. She explicitly added that 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s ruling, which upheld a ban on content moderation in Texas, \u201cwas wrong.\u201d Texas, she said, \u201cmay not interfere with those judgments simply because it would prefer a mix of messages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan Thomas contributed to this report <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that former President Donald Trump is partially immune from prosecution. Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images In a historic, consequential, and controversial decision on Monday, the Supreme Court granted substantial immunity from prosecution to former president Donald Trump on election subversion charges. The decision almost<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump-election-news"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/npr.brightspotcdn.com\/dims3\/default\/strip\/false\/crop\/1024x576+0+54\/resize\/1400\/quality\/100\/format\/jpeg\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fe0%2F56%2Fa3a09f58418d83b6f825d308f0a5%2Fgettyimages-578546876-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nine9ja.com\/pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}