Donald Trump can’t believe his luck. Just a few days after Joe Biden seemed to fire himself from his own job live on air during a toe-curling presidential debate, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that sitting and former presidents of the United States possess a degree of immunity not available to private citizens. In this strange new world, Republicans can now win in televised debates and the courts. Nixon must be rolling in his grave.
The ruling was a clear re-statement of founding principles, rooted in interpretations of the US constitution. Surely the liberal intelligentsia, self-proclaimed guardians of democratic virtue, can find no fault in it? Hardly likely.
In an almost hysterical dissent, Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed the decision made Trump into a “king above the law”. She listed “nightmare scenarios” in which a constitutionally immune president “orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival”. Quite how this cheesy B-rate movie plot would work under the “constitutional” or “official” mitigation is left to the fevered imagination of the New York Times’s editorial board.
Lost in the noise last week was another, equally influential ruling: the end of Chevron deference, a 1984 case that stipulated regulatory agencies were “experts” in their fields and therefore able to interpret ambiguous laws in any way they wish, freed from scrutiny from the lower courts. In essence, Chevron was the administrative state; the grotesque locus of bureaucratic bloat. And as of Friday, it’s dead in the water.
Such rulings represent a sea-change in governance. The long liberal reign over the Supreme Court has finally ended. Decades of empty talk became action only when Donald Trump appointed not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices in the face of dirty tactics during confirmation hearings. To borrow a choice quote from Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Trump made promises and, breaking from Republican convention, kept them.
Rolling back the administrative state, striking down divisive affirmative action schemes and ripping up the always-shaky Roe vs Wade: each ruling more significant than the last, and carried out without Trump even being in power. This is the power of the court made manifest. Governing in a genuinely conservative manner may have even saved Trump’s re-election bid, energising his base in a race he’s predicted to win.
Putting his penchant for gold Louis XIV furniture aside, it might be said that there’s nothing king-like about Donald Trump. His politics has roots in the buccaneering spirit of former president Andrew Jackson. It is blue state America – arrogantly asserting a right to rule on the basis of superior wealth, institutional force and supposed wisdom – that actually embodies the monarchical system at its very worst.
Whether or not Trump wins against Biden – or whichever candidate the Democratic Party establishment airdrops in for November – the presumptive Republican nominee can confidently claim the title of most effective conservative political figure in half a century.
Even with his feet up at Mar-a-Lago, it’s clear who the real president of the United States is.
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