Monday Open Thread: Is It King or Merely President Joe Biden?

Does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure?

Believe it or not, that is the question that the Supreme Court will rule on today. The very nature of the question itself goes against our 248-year history. Our tricameral government ensures that we don't end up with an absolute monarch, who is only accountable to himself and not the rule of law. The leader of the Executive Branch of government should be expected to follow the law, like the 340 million of his or her citizens. While high-level decisions with top-level security will be part of the job, at no time is the president expected to circumvent the law. If for whatever reason she or he does, it is expected that there be consequences for this action. The presidency of the United States is not a four-year blank check on the rule of law. 

Simple, right? 

Thanks to the blatant and devasting right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court, the answer might not be so clear. After all, this is a case that should have never been heard after a lower court ruled unanimously against Trump's claim of absolute immunity. But in taking up the case and slow-walking it to the very last day of the term, the six conservative judges have already given Trump a huge win by ensuring that this case won't make it to trial and have a verdict rendered before the election. If, as I and others expect, the Supreme Court rejects the claim of absolute immunity but requires additional clarity as to what the "official acts" of a president are, then the case will go back down to Judge Tanya Chutkan to define those official acts and how the trial will proceed. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously wrote, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied." Jack Smith and his prosecutors have lost four months that would have been used to ready their case for a public trial that would be starting within the next month that would have demonstrated the treason involved by Donald Trump when it came to the January 6th insurrection.

I honestly can't fathom that the Court will rule in favor of absolute immunity. After all, as we on this blog have posited, that would mean that Joe Biden could do whatever he wanted while in office. Lock up Trump? Check. Ordering a coup against Republican governors? Check. Making foreign governments backroll his own personal pet projects? Check. Assassinating political opponents? Check? Suspending all current and future elections? Check. The list goes on. Are the six right-wing justices so indebted to Donald Trump and his claim that they will grant Joe Biden these types of actions without consequence? Do they really want to give Kamala Harris this type of power in the Executive Office? 

My guess is no. But again, the fact that we're even at this point that this is even a possibility shows how far down the rabbit hole we've gone. We simply cannot have the type of existential crises every June that we have with this current Supreme Court. So while we were told in 2016 that the courts don't matter, we now say without a doubt that the courts absolutely do matter. We need to not only re-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris but we need a Democratic Senate for any upcoming Court vacancies. The current Federalist Society-backed bench is slowly but surely undermining our democracy. Roughly seven in ten Americans no longer see the Court as being impartial. The Democratic Party is the only thing preventing the Court from becoming even more partisan and corrupt. That only happens by voting straight blue in November.

And continuing to vote for Democrats for the rest of our natural-born lives.

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