Well, the Republicans sure did pack the court well, didn't they? The Supreme Court's term finally ended today with another apparent success for the convicted-felon XPOTUS. All three Justices he appointed plus Thomas (R) and Alito (R) agreed with the Chief Justice (R) that, despite the actual words of the Constitution and everything that the Federalist Papers warned us about, some actions by a president during his or her time in office cannot be prosecuted:
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision along [partisan] lines, ruled that a former president has absolute immunity for his core constitutional powers — and is entitled to a presumption of immunity for his official acts, but lacks immunity for unofficial acts. But at the same time, the court sent the case back to the trial judge to determine which, if any of Trump’s actions, were part of his official duties and thus were protected from prosecution.
That part of the court’s decision likely ensures that the case against Trump won’t be tried before the election, and then only if he is not reelected. If he is reelected, Trump could order the Justice Department to drop the charges against him, or he might try to pardon himself in the two pending federal cases.
Monday’s decision to send the case back to trial Judge Tanya Chutkan all but guarantees that there will be no Trump trial on the election interference charges for months. Even before the immunity case, Judge Chutkan indicated that trial preparations would likely take three months. Now, she will also have to decide which of the charges in the Trump indictment should remain and which involve official acts that under the Supreme Court ruling are protected from prosecution.
All of this stands in stark contrast to the way the court has handled other presidential power cases. In 1974 the justices ruled against President Nixon just 16 days after hearing oral arguments. The vote was 8-0, with Justice William Rehnquist recusing himself because of his close ties to some of the officials accused of wrongdoing in the case. And this year the court took less than a month to rule unanimously that states could not bar Trump from the ballot.
That's right, in 50 years the Republican Party has managed to crater the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, which in turn has saddled us with a seemingly never-ending stream of bad decisions that will take two generations to fix.
And they will get fixed, eventually. We fixed Dred Scott by amending the Constitution—after a bloody civil war that killed 600,000 Americans, and we remedied Plessy by passing the Civil Rights Act—80 years later.
So it's not that I have lost hope in the United States, it's just that I'm old enough that I don't believe I'm going to see the right-wing grinding down of the country reversed before I'm too old to enjoy it.