CNN
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Chief Justice John Roberts, captivated by the image of a bold and fearless American president, has abandoned normal restraints and declared a remarkable level of immunity for a former president facing criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the election results.
To borrow a baseball cliché again, a bold statement from someone who famously likened judges to umpires who simply call balls and strikes: Roberts stretched constitutional protections for a president who may be indicted, all but ensuring that former President Donald Trump will avoid trial for overturning the 2020 election before the 2024 presidential election.
Roberts emphasized the “unique gravity” of the presidential responsibility, and dwelled on the word “fearlessly,” saying the president makes “the most delicate and far-reaching decisions entrusted to any public office” and must be given “the fullest ability to handle” that job “fearlessly and impartially.”
Justice Roberts, along with his five Republican-appointed colleagues, three of whom were Trump himself, have embraced an unforgiving vision of presidential immunity in which traditional respect for judicial authority has been overshadowed by aspirations to presidentialism.
Justice Roberts is usually wary of these overt political conflicts. He typically takes a more judicial, institutional approach. And he is certainly aware that the justices have ruled unanimously in previous major disputes over the separation of powers, such as United States v. Nixon in 1974 and Clinton v. Jones in 1997, both of which ruled against sitting presidents.
In these cases, the justices voted against the interests of the president who appointed them.
But that is not this court.
And Roberts today bears little resemblance to the Supreme Court justice known for brokering compromises in politically tense disputes, such as upholding Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act just months before the 2012 presidential election.
The justices’ decision today reflects the deep political polarization in the country. While Justice Roberts downplayed the chaos Trump spread after the 2020 election, the dissenting justices emphasized it. More substantively, they said Justice Roberts’ “single-minded obsession with the president’s need for boldness and swiftness” runs counter to constitutional history and relevant past precedent.
Roberts, meanwhile, mocked his three liberal opponents, saying they “exude a terrible sense of doom.”
Roberts has previously been at pains to voice his condemnation of Trump’s norm-breaking actions, and at one point publicly pushed back against the former president’s attacks on the judiciary. But on Monday, he calmly summed up the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, avoiding any reference to the former president.
Roberts, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, has supported executive branch power in the past.
But the decision in Trump v. United States is more far-reaching and likely to define Roberts’ broader legacy as Chief Justice.
Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, will begin his 20th term as the center’s director next October.
The 69-year-old justice read parts of the ruling in court on Monday, citing some of the most dramatic passages from the written decision and arguing that if a newly elected president is free to indict his predecessor, the result would be a “self-eating executive branch.”
Roberts wrote that under the shadow of “possible prosecution,” a president would be reluctant to make decisions “without fear and impartiality,” effectively rendering him powerless. He wrote that the president is protected from prosecution with respect to “core constitutional powers” and “has, at a minimum, a presumptive right to immunity from prosecution with respect to all official acts.”
The court’s new “presumed immunity” represents a major victory for Trump at this stage of the protracted litigation brought by the Department of Justice. Special Counsel Jack Smith. Last August, Smith charged Trump with a variety of conspiracy, fraud and obstruction charges over the activities that culminated on January 6.
02:41 – Source: CNN
Ty Cobb explained why he was ‘disappointed’ in Sotomayor’s dissent
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking for the dissenting party, strengthened her argument, accusing the majority of “reconstructing the presidency” by supporting Trump and “making a mockery of the principle that no one is above the law.”
Her voice exuded contempt, as when she mocked Mr Roberts for saying that independent leaders were expected to “act boldly and without hesitation”.
In one particularly impassioned argument, a senior liberal justice told the audience that the majority had given Trump “all the immunity he sought and more.”
Among the guests in the VIP section near the courtroom benches was Supreme Court Justice Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of the Supreme Court justice. At the lawyers’ box was Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreben, who represented Smith in April and will now work with the special counsel’s team to decide how to proceed.
(Mr. Roberts and Mr. Dreben have a longstanding connection. Before becoming a judge, Mr. Roberts was an appeals court lawyer. In January 1989, he faced off against Mr. Dreben, then an assistant U.S. attorney general, in his first case before the Supreme Court, which Mr. Roberts won.)
The case now returns to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who previously rejected Trump’s immunity claim, to determine which of Trump’s actions in protesting the 2020 election results qualify as “unofficial” and therefore subject to criminal charges. Trump has previously argued that virtually all of his actions surrounding the 2020 election were “official actions” and therefore immune from criminal prosecution.
Defending the Supreme Court’s handling of the case
Roberts deflected attention from Trump, who filed the lawsuit, arguing that broad presidential immunity protects “the institution of the presidency,” not the president personally.
Yet those arguments were laced with a subtle defensiveness about the Supreme Court’s handling of the Trump controversy. He said the justices had “little to no relevant precedent” to guide their review of the case. “Less than five months after granting the government’s request to take up the issue, we are… swiftly ruling.”
But in December, the majority denied Smith’s request to hear the consequential immunity issue sooner in a one-sentence order. The court did not schedule oral argument until late April.
Judge Chutkan ruled earlier in December that Trump does not have immunity from criminal prosecution. “Whatever immunity a sitting President may enjoy, there is only one Chief Executive Officer of the United States at a time, and that position does not confer lifetime ‘freedom of attorney,'” he wrote.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the ruling, writing, “In this criminal case, former President Trump is entitled to the same defenses as any other criminal defendant, including as a citizen of Trump. However, the executive immunity that protected former President Trump while he was president no longer protects former President Trump from this prosecution.”
Sotomayor supported that view and reminded us of how it all began.
“In a final, desperate bid to retain power, Trump allegedly sought to use the violence and chaos at the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to delay the certification of the election and ultimately declare himself the winner, which is what brought this case to the Supreme Court,” she wrote.
Not so for Supreme Court justices.
“Unlike the political sector and the general public, we cannot afford to fixate solely or primarily on the current emergency,” he said.
“We need to take a more forward-looking view,” Roberts writes.
