Mark Sherman, Associated Press
Posted on Thursday, April 25, 2024 11:23 amEDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Debates have begun in the Supreme Court over whether former President Donald Trump can avoid prosecution for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
On Thursday, the justices examined for the first time whether a former president has absolute immunity from criminal charges for actions he took while in office, as Trump claims. He is the first former president to be charged with crimes.
Trump had said he wanted to be at the Supreme Court on Thursday. Instead, he was in a New York courtroom, where he is on trial on charges of falsifying business records to conceal information damaging to voters when he directed hush money payments to a former porn star to keep secret her claims that They had sexual relations. find.
The timing of the Supreme Court’s decision could be as important as the outcome. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the November election, and the later the judges issue his decision, the more likely he will be successful.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team calls for a quick resolution. The court usually issues its final rulings at the end of June, about four months before elections.
Trump’s lawyers maintain that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, they say, politically motivated prosecutions of former occupants of the Oval Office would become routine and presidents would be unable to function as commander in chief if they had to worry about criminal charges.
Lower courts have rejected those arguments, including a unanimous three-judge panel on an appeals court in Washington, DC.
The election interference conspiracy case filed by Smith in Washington is just one of four criminal cases Trump faces.
Smith’s team says the men who wrote the Constitution never intended for presidents to be above the law and that, in any case, the acts Trump is accused of, including participating in a plot to recruiting fake electors in battleground states won by Biden are in no way part of a president’s official duties.
Nearly four years ago, all nine justices rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from a district attorney’s subpoena for his financial records. That case unfolded during Trump’s presidency and involved a criminal investigation, but there were no charges.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who would have blocked execution of the subpoena because of Trump’s responsibilities as president, still rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity, pointing to the text of the Constitution and how the people who ratified it understood it.
“The text of the Constitution…does not grant the president absolute immunity,” Thomas wrote in 2020.
The court’s apparent lack of support for the type of blanket immunity Trump seeks has caused commentators to speculate about why the court took up the case in the first place.
Phillip Bobbitt, a constitutional scholar at Columbia University Law School, said he is concerned about the delay but sees value in a decision that amounts to “a definitive expression from the Supreme Court that we are a government of laws and not of men”.
The court may also be more concerned about how its decision could affect future presidencies, Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith wrote on the Lawfare blog.
But Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the court should never have taken the case because an ideologically diverse panel of the federal appeals court in Washington adequately addressed the issues.
“If I was going to take the case, I should have proceeded more quickly, because now it will most likely prevent the trial from being completed before the election,” Roosevelt said. “Even Richard Nixon said the American people deserve to know if their president is a criminal. The Supreme Court seems to disagree.”
The court has several options to decide the case. The judges could reject Trump’s arguments and unfreeze the case so U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan can resume preparations for the trial, which she has indicated could take up to three months.
The court could end Smith’s prosecution by declaring for the first time that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts they performed while in office.
He could also specify when former presidents are protected from prosecution and declare that Trump’s alleged conduct easily crossed the line or return the case to Chutkan so she can decide whether Trump should be prosecuted.