Presidential Immunity is a by product of separation of powers. If the President can be made to be subject to the Judiciary, he ceases to be President, the one man embodiment of the Executive Branch of the government. The Court has nibbled around the periphery of this issue in the past, but now it has to deal with it four squarely due to the idiocy of the Biden administration in attempting to use lawfare to take out Trump. Plenty of our prior Presidents committed crimes while as President. FDR used to read the tax returns of political opponents. LBJ had the FBI bug Barry Goldwater’s headquarters. Obama had an American citizen killed in a drone strike overseas, etc. No prosecutions because of the adverse impact on the country of doing so. In their zeal to get Orange Man Bad, of course, his enemies are quite determined to destroy the Republic in order to save it.
But, since the Supreme Court alone gets to decide all this, he is very “subject to the judiciary”.
Why would, as the Tweet suggests. Amy Coney Barrett vote with the liberals? Is she slowly caving in to liberalism?
This is a complicated area, and in complicate areas of the law different lawyers are going to have different opinions. This is not clear cut, since the Constitution says precisely nothing about presidential immunity.
But, since the Supreme Court alone gets to decide all this, he is very “subject to the judiciary”.
I can’t think of any other group that could decide in an area where the Constitution is silent. If the Court decides for an expansive view of presidential immunity it eliminates an ongoing collision between the Executive and the Judiciary.
Agreed, Donald. But I still think Barrett is turning liberal, if the news media is to be believed. While not germane to the Trump immunity case before SCOTUS, here is an example:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4618282-female-supreme-court-justices-push-back-most-strongly-on-idaho-abortion-ban/amp/
“The four female justices, including conservative Amy Coney Barrett, pushed back the hardest against Idaho’s assertion that its law, which prohibits doctors from performing an abortion except when a woman’s life is in danger, supersedes the federal emergency care statute known as EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.”
Oral arguments are sometimes deceptive as to votes, especially when filtered by that monument to the Fallen State of Man, the Fourth Estate. I doubt if Barrett is going soft on abortion.
“Oral arguments are sometimes deceptive as to votes, especially when filtered by that monument to the Fallen State of Man, the Fourth Estate.”
You can almost ALWAYS dismiss what the press says about anything. Hunter Biden laptop “misinformation.” There is more misinformation than actual information and with the AI trend, we soon won’t be able to believe our lyin’ eyes.
But beware of the smiling juror….
I’ve noticed that most commentary on Supreme Court or other appellate court arguments tends to reflect the political predisposition of the commenter. I hope this guy is right, but as Donald notes, trying to predict a court vote based on a judge’s behavior at oral argument is not a high-percentage bet.
I’m not sure this problem is a matter of the President being subject to the Judiciary.
The courts are the playing field, not the players–those would be the current prosecutors, who ultimately derive their powers from the current president. So this would seem to be a question of a President’s acts being subjected to the law enforcement powers of a future President–an inter-Executive branch squabble, if you will.
(Which goes a long way to explaining why Trump’s lawyers had previously argued that the remedy for presidential crimes is impeachment–the separation of powers issue at stake here would be the Executive infringing on the powers of the Legislative branch.)