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SCOTUS Is Intentionally Slow Walking Trump's Immunity Case

To anyone paying any amount of attention to the actions of the extremist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court - calling them "conservatives" is, in my view ridiculous and an insult to the intelligence of citizens not to mention true conservatives  - has easily observed that partisanship, extreme ideology, and religious extremism are what motivates the right wing justices.  The Dobbs ruling striking down Roe v. Wade was filled with religion bigotry and extremism and was authored by Samuel Alito who has flown pro-insurrectionist flags from his homes (he has disingenuously, blamed it on his wife). Other rulings have favored extremist "Christians" and deliberately eroded the separation of church and state which was important to the Founding Fathers who were well aware of the dangers of linking religion and government as displayed by Europe's wars of religion.  Now, with Donald Trump insanely and disingenuously claiming blanket immunity from prosecution for any acts taking while in office, the majority is deliberately slow walking its ruling which could easily have been handled by affirming the lengthy and well reasoned Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. Why?  So that Trump will not face trial before the November election and would be positioned to end the cases should he regain the White House. What is equally insane is the reality that if the Court affirmed Trump's claim, then Joe Biden should have Trump arrested and executed citing the very immunity Trump is claiming. A piece in Salon looks at the intentional delay in holding Trump accountable for his crimes.  Here are highlights:

The Supreme Court’s delay in deciding Donald Trump’s immunity case makes a trial before election highly unlikely, legal experts say.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the four-count indictment against Trump in August 2023, has accused the former president of conspiring to thwart his 2020 electoral defeat and the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden. 

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University, said the Supreme Court has dragged its feet. “it's obvious that the court has deliberately delayed everything,” he said. “It could easily have issued a ruling much sooner.”

Last December, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges on grounds of absolute presidential immunity, which he argues completely shields him from prosecution for any actions taken while in office. Trump has argued the House has to impeach a former president and the Senate has to convict before an ex-president could be criminally prosecuted.

In early February, the D.C. Circuit upheld the judge’s decision and rejected Trump’s claim. Chutkan also indefinitely delayed Trump’s original March 2024 trial date until courts resolved Trump’s immunity argument.

Trump then asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and offer justices’ “thoughtful consideration.” In late February, the Supreme Court decided to take up Trump’s immunity appeal.  “It could have taken the case in December when the special counsel asked it to be heard directly, or they could have declined to take the case after the court of appeals quite comprehensively rejected Trump's appeal, so the trial could be over by now,” Tribe said. “Instead, the court has dragged its feet.”

Hofstra University constitutional law professor James Sample said there was “no legal necessity” for the Supreme Court to take up this case, and Trump’s “dangerous” arguments, in the first place.

“When you compare the Supreme Court's handling of similarly urgent presidential matters in the past, including Watergate and the Nixon tapes and certainly Bush v Gore, the delay that has occurred here is intentional, and it is destructive of our democratic process,” Sample said. “The D.C. Circuit’s decision was thorough. It was by judges appointed by presidents from both parties, and it was correct on the merits, the Supreme Court has effectively interfered in the political process for no reason whatsoever other than for the purpose of interfering."

Attorney General Merrick Garland, for example, has faced criticism for waiting until November 2022 to appoint Smith in the first place. The Washington Post reported that the FBI resisted investigating Jan. 6 for over a year. 

But once the Supreme Court decided to take up the appeal, Wofford said she hasn’t been surprised by how long it’s taken for the court to release a decision on a sweeping constitutional question.

Trump’s lawyer is arguing that the Constitution provides him permanent immunity from criminal liability for his definition of what constitutes a President’s official acts.

Several legal experts said they expect the court will reject Trump’s claim to absolute immunity. 

“There's no prospect that the court will agree that no matter what a sitting president does, even if he orders SEAL Team Six to kill an opponent, that he cannot in the future be criminally prosecuted for it, unless he was first impeached and convicted by the Senate,” Tribe said. “That is a ridiculous position.”

Penn State Law fellow Stanley Brand, a former House of Representatives general counsel, agreed: “I don't think that a majority of the court, even the conservatives, are going to buy that he is absolutely immune from any of these charges.”

And Wofford said: “The worst option for those who want to see Trump prosecuted would obviously be the court rules he has immunity for official acts, and that all acts taken here alleged in the indictment were official. But I just don't think there's a majority of justices willing to go to that extreme.”

Tribe said there’s consensus among legal experts about examples of a president duly exercising executive power: “But none of that is involved in this case.”

Wofford pointed out that at oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett got Trump’s counsel to acknowledge that certain conduct alleged in the indictment constituted private acts – and that a former president can be prosecuted for private acts. 

Specifically, Barrett asked Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer if “turning to a private attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud to spearhead his challenges to the election results” counts as a private act.

She also asked Sauer about Trump allegedly conspiring with a private attorney “who caused the filing in court of a verification signed by petition that contained false allegations to support a challenge.”

And Barrett asked about Trump allegedly directing an effort involving private actors “to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding."

Sauer said he disputes the allegations, but said those acts “sound private.”

Tribe said the special counsel could proceed with trial 88 days from whenever the case is handed down – a length of time that Tribe said Judge Chutkan said Trump should be entitled in order to prepare for trial.

“If that happens, it's at least theoretically possible, though not likely, that there could be a trial of the former president for at least the core of what he is alleged to have done to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” Tribe said. “That doesn't include all of the crimes that he may have committed leading up to and including January 6, but it includes enough so that before the election occurs, the American people could at least know whether a jury of ordinary citizens is ready to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Donald Trump interfered with the legal transfer of power and committed serious federal felonies in doing so.”  

 Tribe said. “It would essentially allow political considerations to trump the rule of law, and I'm worried that, given how slow he was to authorize special counsel in the first place, and given how judicious and cautious he has been, that Garland might, in fact, essentially, play along with the Supreme Court's unconscionable delay by allowing the case to languish until after the election.”

And then if Trump wins, Tribe said: “There's no question that he will get rid of the charges by selecting a compliant attorney general who will just do his bidding. I hope Attorney General Garland does not succumb to that temptation.”

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Trump’s Latest Proposals Are Both Economically and Fiscally Illiterate.

One hears constantly how many Americans continue to whine about the American economy despite the data that shows the economy is in fact doing well - indeed, it is the envy of other advanced industrial nations - and the fact that these same voters say they themselves are doing well.  Worse yet, these same individuals who misguidedly think a Trump 2.0 regime would be better for the economy are paying zero attention to Trump's economic proposals which among other things do away with income taxes - always a fever dream of the very wealthy - and the imposition of high tariffs which would (i) blow up the federal deficit, setting the stage for draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and (ii) be a huge financial blow to average Americans who could see prices of imported goods soar. Unfortunately, many in the media are failing to report on the dire impact Trump's proposals would unleash, especially for his working class supporters who seem focused solely on Trump's fanning of their racial and social hatreds.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at Trump's proposals on ending the income tax and the imposition of tariffs (which would be paid by consumers) and the horrific results than most Americans would suffer.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s reported idea to replace the income tax with huge tariffs on imports exposes the hollowness of his populism.

Economists are warning that Trump’s reported idea to eliminate the income tax and replace it with massive tariffs on imports would cripple the economy, explode the cost of living, and likely set off a trade war. And because the math doesn’t come close to working, it would also tremendously increase the national debt.

In other words, Trump’s latest notion is both economically and fiscally illiterate. “If a 20yo interviewing for a House internship suggested replacing the income tax with a massive tariff, they’d be laughed out of the interview,” Brian Riedl, a conservative budget expert, wrote on X.

The politics of Trump’s latest scheme are perhaps even worse, because this plan exposes the hypocrisy of his faux populism. Indeed, what’s striking about the idea is just how regressive and non-populist it is. Replacing the income tax with tariffs would result in massive tax cuts for the ultrarich—at the expense of middle and lower-class Americans. Brendan Duke and Ryan Mulholland of the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimate that Trump’s proposal would raise taxes by $8,300 for the middle 20 percent of households, if American consumers end up bearing the full brunt of tariffs on imports.

Even a more modest version of Trumponomics—imposing a 10 percent tax on all imports and a 60 percent tax on all imports from China, without trying to replace the income tax altogether—could result in a $2,500 annual tax increase for the typical family. . . . Middle-class families would pay more for gas and oil, along with toys and food. That’s because, as any economist will tell you, a large portion of increased tariffs are ultimately paid by consumers, not by the companies importing the goods. Republicans used to understand this concept, but now they seem desperate to deny it: Anna Kelly, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, recently insisted, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.” This is economic bunkum.

But then, so is Trump’s whole bizarre scheme, which relies on fabulist math. Abolishing income taxes would create a multitrillion-dollar hole in the federal budget. . . . . In order to make up for the lost income-tax revenue, Trump would have to impose a tax of 100 percent on the value of everything we import. In other words, the cost of everything we import from abroad would more than double.

In the real world, this huge new tax would suppress demand for imports, which would in turn drive down the revenue from the Trump tariffs. The result: massive deficits as revenue falls short, even-higher taxes on the remaining imports, and draconian cuts in spending, including the entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, that Trump has promised (if somewhat inconsistently) to protect.

And then there is the Ghost of Smoot-Hawley. Historians and economists regard the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act—which dramatically boosted tariffs on imports—as a disastrous miscalculation that deepened the Great Depression. Trump’s tariff tax is Smoot-Hawley with its hair on fire.

All of this might explain the skepticism of the otherwise friendly CEOs who talked to Trump at a recent meeting of the Business Roundtable. “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” one CEO reportedly said; the CEO reportedly added that Trump failed to explain how he planned to implement his policies. Some of the executives apparently seemed surprised by the realization that the former president’s economic ideas were nonsense.

Maybe they should start paying closer attention. But so should Trump’s base. Despite Trump’s insistence that he is the tribune of the forgotten common man, the former president’s economic incoherence could prove devastating to the very voters he claims to champion.

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For Trump World, It's All About Lies and Deception

Saddled with a candidate who by numerous reports cannot stay on topic and continually meanders into crazy talk - which seemingly delights his cultist base - not to mention who is a convicted felon, Trump world is desperately trying to depict Joe Biden as old and senile so as to minimize their own candidate's true mental instability. The result is endless lies - not something new with Trump - and doctored videos to misrepresent Biden and draw attention from the reality that it is their man who needs the mental health intervention.  Sadly, too many mainstream "news" outlets continue to be afraid to immediately expose Trump's/Trump world's lies and to call Trump what he is: a convicted felon who is a pathological liar with seeming rapidly declining mental acuity.  Indeed, many in the media have learned nothing from their mistakes in 2016 and 2020 and aid the Trump propaganda rather than inform the public about the truth and the clear and present danger that Trump constitutes to both American democracy and national security.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the frustrating situation.  Here are highlights:

Republicans and their media ecosystem seem to be in a panic about their candidate.

As the presidential candidates head into their first debate next week, Trump’s people should be happy. Their candidate, of course, is dragging around a sled loaded with politically toxic baggage: He’s a convicted felon; he was found liable for sexual abuse; he tried to incite an insurrection; his speeches include gibberish about sharks and a movie cannibal. He multiplies his own troubles at every turn, even undermining surrogates who keep trying to explain away his darker or weirder statements. And yet, against every rule of political physics, Trump is running even or perhaps pulling ahead of a reasonably successful incumbent.

But if Trump is doing so well, why is his campaign and its support system in right-wing media resorting to easily disproved lies?

Last week, for example, Biden was at the G7 meeting in Italy. The Republican National Committee released a video of him apparently wandering off from a group at a skydiving exhibition, like a confused grandpa looking for the van back to the senior-citizens home. The New York Post dutifully ran with the video. It looked bad—but as presented, it was a lie. Biden was turning to talk to a paratrooper just a few yards to his left.

The RNC video and the Post’s obedient amplification weren’t based on spin or interpretation. Someone had to have looked at that video of Biden in Europe and made the conscious decision to create a lie. Let’s just cut the frame right there so that Biden looks like he wandered off. By the time anyone figures it out, it won’t matter.

The video made the rounds, and maybe that’s all the RNC wanted. A lie, as the saying goes, gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. . . . . if your candidate is doing well, why take the risk? A party that thinks its candidate is in control doesn’t take the chance of pulling the spotlight away from the opponent, which is exactly what happens when campaign operatives get caught in a lie.

The campaign engaged in a similarly baffling move this past weekend, when Trump went to Detroit. The Trump courtier Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to congratulate him for speaking to 8,000 people at a Black church. Trump did, in fact, speak at a Black church—but to a crowd of perhaps 100 or so mostly white people in a half-empty space that couldn’t hold 8,000 people even if seats were installed in the rafters and on the roof. . . . . So why not take the win, run the video of Trump with a Black pastor, and leave it at that? Why go for the big lie and then look foolish?

One possibility is that the Trump campaign is worried. Maybe Conway was just gilding the Trump lily, but MAGA world appears to be working overtime to make Trump and Biden seem indistinguishable and thus equivalently awful. Last week, Andrew Ross Sorkin reported on CNBC that top U.S. business leaders were concerned about Trump’s mental fitness after a meeting on June 13 with the former president. Several CEOs, according to Sorkin, said that Trump “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought,” and “was all over the map.”

Deceptively edited videos, nonexistent crowds, and No, your man is more senile than ours counterprogramming is not the sign of a confident campaign. But Trump’s team might also be doing these things because they work. . . . .t he media response to the Trump event was all the campaign could ask for. Instead of publishing a headline like “Trump Speaks to a Small, Mostly White Audience of Loyalists in Black Church as His Campaign Lies About Crowd Size,” the Associated Press rolled out an article titled “Trump Blasts Immigrants for Taking Jobs as He Courts Voters at a Black Church, MAGA Event in Detroit.”

If nonevents bolstered by outrageous falsehoods generate coverage like this, who could blame the Trump campaign for thinking that lying is merely a small frictional cost of getting great headlines? Trump’s people understand the power of the fast lie and slow correction, and they know, too, that the media are reflexively averse to reporting on one of the major candidates as an unstable felon who is flatly lying to the public.

The Trump campaign has seized on the essential truth that this election is about images and feelings rather than facts or policies. It is working to squeeze every vote it can out of its most extreme supporters by providing them with the high-octane Trumpiness they crave. But the campaign is also resorting to sometimes-desperate ploys in order to cover both candidates in a carefully formulated smog, hoping to obscure the differences between an old man who occasionally stumbles over his words and a nearly-as-old criminal who regularly wanders out of the gates of Fort Reality to go on a walkabout in the wilds of his unstable mind.

In the end, the Trump campaign has chosen the path of deception both because the weaknesses of its candidate demand it and because it’s a more reliable path to better media coverage and to winning over credulous and inattentive voters. Why bother telling the truth if lying works so well?

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Brexit: A Cautionary Tale For American Voters

Since the height of the British Empire prior to WWI, the United Kingdom has undergone a number of economic set backs as the empire dwindled and at times the nation failed to face changing economic conditions that adversely impacted the nation's economy.  The most recent economic disaster, however, has been totally self-inflicted in the form of Brexit and the UK's exit from the European Union.  Much like the MAGA base in America, the leave vote was motivated by racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hatred as well as a delusion of somehow restoring the nation to its one time empire status. Instead of the promised results - much akin to Donald Trump's "make America great again" promises - the UK has seen soaring prices, difficulty bringing in imports and the number of immigrants entering the county has increased, not decreased.  Indeed. some projections see the average British citizen seeing their economic situation sliding compared to their counterparts in Poland and Slovakia.  Yet, with elections fast approaching which could see the Tories annihilated, no one is talking about the elephant in the room, namely Brexit, and the reality that Brexit has been overall a disaster. A piece The Atlantic looks at the situation in the UK and the warning it should send to American voters of what Trump's promised tariffs and other economic policies could bring.  Here are highlights:

Brexit reshaped the United Kingdom’s relationship with the continent across the Channel. And yet the B-word has barely featured in the campaign to choose the next Westminster government on July 4—not in the debates between party leaders, nor in the policy measures briefed to friendly newspapers, nor in the leaflets sent out by individual candidates.

As someone who has worked in journalism in Britain for nearly two decades, I can tell you: This is an extraordinary turnaround. During the first half of my career, the campaign to leave the European Union was an obsession of the Conservative right . . . . Then came the 2016 referendum, in which Brexit was hailed as a populist triumph against the elite consensus and a foreshadowing of Donald Trump’s election in the U.S. that November.

[T]he Tories, now led by Rishi Sunak, are getting exactly zero credit for delivering their signature policy and laying to rest their obsession of the past two decades. The Conservatives are now so far behind in the polls . . . . Despite having delivered Brexit exactly as they promised, the Conservatives don’t just fear defeat on July 4. They fear annihilation.

What happened? Quite simply, Brexit has been a bust. Conservative ministers like to talk up the trade deals they have signed with non-European countries, but no normal voter cares about pork markets. Anyone who voted for Brexit to reduce immigration will have been severely disappointed: Net migration was 335,000 in 2016, but rose to 685,000 last year, down from a record high of 784,000 in 2022. And although the economic effects of leaving the European single market were blurred by the pandemic and the energy shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one can safely say that Britons do not feel richer than they did four years ago.

In the current election, polls suggest that Labour is winning over many Leave voters who supported the Conservatives in 2019. The last thing those switchers want to hear is backsliding on Europe. And so the Labour manifesto promises to “make Brexit work” with no return to the single market, customs union, or freedom of movement.

The B-word has featured more heavily in debates in Scotland, where the majority of voters backed Remain and the governing Scottish National Party is keen to outflank Labour. It is also an election issue in Northern Ireland, where the status of the border with the Republic of Ireland is still fraught. But with both major parties in England extremely reluctant to mention Brexit, the media here have largely followed suit.

The trouble is that minor tinkering might help some of the minor problems created by Brexit . . . . but only rejoining the single market would bring dramatic economic benefits. And doing that would involve exactly the trade-off with British sovereignty that Brexiteers campaigned against for so long. Hard conversations can be postponed, but usually not forever. That’s bad news for the 97 percent of Britons who are enjoying the respite from years of arguments over Britain’s relationship with Europe.

For now, though, the political consequences of Brexit fatigue are most pronounced on the right. Leaving the EU has created many modest irritations—see Bernie the bear’s love life—without delivering the large rewards that were promised. Here is a lesson for populists everywhere, one that the U.S. anti-abortion lobby has learned since Roe v. Wade was overturned: Don’t be the dog that catches the car.

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How John Roberts Lost His Court

Public faith in and approval of the U.S. Supreme Court is near an all time low with ethics scandals swirling and right wing justices seemingly caring nothing about the will of the public and instead seeking to inflict their personal beliefs, many religious, on the nation. Clarence Thomas seemingly is for sale to the highest bidder and Samuel Alito comes across as having served in the Spanish Inquisition in a former life - his opinion in Dobbs was all about religious belief, not the law. Brett Kavanagh remains under a cloud of sexual assault allegations and Amy Coney-Barrett's far right religious affiliations give many Americans pause. Ostensibly overseeing the fractious and ethically challenged Court is Chief Justice John Roberts who has lost control of the Court and appears powerless to rein in the other justices in order to halt the public disapproval of the Court.  As a long time follower of the Court it is hard to see how things get turned around, especially when Congressional efforts to impose some minimal ethical restraints are continually rebuffed.   A piece in the New York Times looks at Robert's helplessness in saving the Court from itself and the right wing zealots now in control: Here are excerpts

A self-described documentary filmmaker, trolling a gala dinner for a gotcha moment by engaging Supreme Court justices in conversation and surreptitiously recording their words, arguably scored with Justice Samuel Alito when he told her he shared their stated goal of returning “our country to a place of godliness.”

But with Chief Justice John Roberts, the undercover provocateur, Lauren Windsor, struck out. In response to her question about whether the court had an obligation to guide the country “toward a more moral path,” the chief justice shot back: “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path? That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” He went on: “And it’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide the cases as best we can.”

Good for Chief Justice Roberts. Still, his admirable response to what he surely assumed was a private query invites a further thought. Deciding cases is indeed the court’s job. But deciding cases may not be enough these days, when the Supreme Court has plummeted in public esteem to near-historic lows (41 percent last September, according to Gallup) and every week seems to bring a new challenge to its image of probity and detachment.

Approaching his 19th anniversary on the court, the chief justice surely takes satisfaction in having accomplished central elements of his own agenda. His name is on majority opinions that have curbed affirmative action, struck at the heart of the Voting Rights Act and empowered religious conservatives, all with the support of his conservative colleagues and over vigorous dissenting opinions by the liberal justices.

What he has “lost,” rather, isn’t control of the court’s judicial output, but of something less tangible but no less important: its ability to assure the public that it is functioning as a court where all parties get a fair hearing and where individual justices aren’t beholden elsewhere, either financially or politically. . . . Persuading a majority of the court to rule for one’s client is simple compared with persuading a fellow Supreme Court justice to withdraw from a case in which the public has reason to suppose partiality.

I’ve been asked quite often why Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t just instruct Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas, or at least jawbone them, to recuse themselves from the cases on Donald Trump’s prosecution arising from the 2020 election and the 2021 attack on the Capitol. Calls for Justice Alito’s recusal followed reports in The New York Times recently that flags associated with 2020 election deniers and carried by supporters of President Trump on Jan. 6 were hung at his Virginia home and his New Jersey beach house. Justice Thomas has also faced calls to step aside from those cases, given his wife’s open affiliation with the forces of election denial that led to the Jan. 6 riot.

Last month, in declining a request by two Democratic senators, Richard Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, for a meeting “as soon as possible” to discuss what they called the court’s “ethics crisis,” the chief justice referred to “the practice we have followed for 235 years pursuant to which individual justices decide recusal issues.”

I’ve thought about Chief Justice Rehnquist as criticism of the court has intensified in the last few months. He was a fierce defender of the court’s standing and prerogatives, using his year-end “state of the judiciary” report to speak up for judicial independence and call out Congress for enacting legislation with impact on the judiciary without consulting the judicial branch. (Chief Justice Roberts, to his credit, did rebuke President Trump in 2018 for attacking a judge who had ruled against his administration.) We’ll never know, obviously, but I think Chief Justice Rehnquist would have drawn on his deep well of capital inside the court and found a way to let Justices Alito and Thomas know that recusal from the Trump immunity case would be highly advisable even if not required.

The current chief justice maintains exquisite control of his public persona, to the extent that it is hard to think of a spontaneous John Roberts act. But some spontaneity is called for now. His response to the Democratic senators was stiff and formulaic. If there is a blueprint for addressing the issues now swirling around the court, it has eluded a chief justice who might not have acquired the institutional capital to call on in a time of need.

He has relied throughout his career on meticulous preparation. . . . . But no amount of preparation could have prepared him for the challenge the court now faces. There is no script to follow when a justice’s spouse has worked to overthrow an election on behalf of a former president whose fate is in the court’s hands. For years, as a lawyer before the court, John Roberts’s audience consisted of nine justices looking down at him from the bench. His record was impressive: 25 wins and only 14 losses. Now his audience, orders of magnitude wider, is an increasingly concerned public looking for reassurance that it’s not the court that is lost.

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