Tag Archives: immunity

No one is above the law?

Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, most of us have operated under the believe that the laws apply to everyone, regardless of occupation, wealth or social standing.

Have laid down that predicate, let’s suppose Kamala Harris is elected president in November, defeating a former POTUS who faces numerous criminal indictments for actions he allegedly committed to overturn the results of the previous presidential election.

Does the president-elect call off the dogs, ordering the Justice Department to cease and desist in its probe of the former president?

Abso(freaking)lutely not!

Donald Trump has accused DOJ of hunting him down because they want him out of office.  That, of course, is nonsense, covered in self-aggrandizing narcissism.

The high court earlier this year ruled that presidents are entitled to immunity from prosecution if the crime they commit falls in line with his action as president. Special counsel Jack Smith then reindicted Trump, resurrecting the indictments that were effectively rendered moot by the SCOTUS.

No self-respecting prosecutor is going to say his or her sole intent in pursuing a legal matter is to rid the world of a politician. I believe Jack Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland are far more than merely self-respecting lawyers.

If this election turns out the right way in November, we will have a president-elect who once served as a district attorney, a state prosecutor and a state attorney general. Something tells me she won’t let up on the gas for a moment in bringing Donald Trump to justice.

Nor should she.

Trump: luckiest pol … ever!

Donald J. Trump is vying for the unofficial title of luckiest politician of all time.

Ponder this for a moment. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 and President Obama sought to nominate Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS vacancy. The Senate’s premier obstructionist, GOP leader Mitch McConnell, intervened, saying that Obama didn’t have the right to nominate anyone in an election year. McConnell blocked Garland’s nomination hoping that Trump would win in 2016. Trump won in what will go down as the greatest political fluke in US history.

Then the new POTUS named three justices to the court.

Together, along with three other right-wing justices, they have determined that POTJSes have immunity against prosecution for crimes committed while performing their official duties. Trump already has been convicted of 34 felony counts, but that doesn’t stop him from running again.

Trial judges down the line are now hamstrung by the high court’s immunity ruling, possibly enabling Trump to run out the clock and hope — and man, this pains me to write this — that he wins the 2024 election … which would doom any chance of any conviction on any of the remaining trials.

That the presumptive GOP nominee is even in a position to win the next election baffles me beyond all measure. It is stunning in the extreme. This guy is without question the most immoral reprobate ever to seek high political office.

Yet there he is, riding this god-awful wave of good luck possibly right back into the White House, the one place on Earth where he never should be seen again.

Go … figure!

SCOTUS trashes another established notion

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has laid waste to another established legal tenet, let us look briefly at what might lie ahead.

The court, ruling 6 to 3, has decided that presidents do have presumed immunity from prosecution if they commit wrongdoing while sitting in the office. The court let stand the notion that a president can be prosecuted for acts he committed after he leaves office.

We all thought that “no one is above the law.” Well … that’s not quite true. It means, in this matter specifically, that Donald Trump was within legal authority to provoke the Jan. 6 onslaught on the Capitol and then do nothing to stop it while mobsters assaulted the cops, crashed through windows, defecated on the floor of our Capitol and threatened to execute the VP if he didn’t obey Trump’s command to overturn the result of the 2020 election … which Trump lost to Joe Biden!

Does this mean, therefore, that Joe Biden could send a special forces sniper team to assassinate his opponents before he leaves office? Of. course not … except that the court ruled that illegal acts might be protected.

When I served in the US Army long ago, I was told that we didn’t have to obey unlawful orders. We were instructed to resist them. Vice President Mike Pence received what to my mind was an unlawful order from Trump to “do the right thing” by stopping the certification of the 2020 election result. Pence has said all along he didn’t have the authority to act.

He followed the law and the US Constitution. Trump should be tried for issuing that order. SCOTUS, again in my view, got this ruling wrong.