Policy expert and journalist William S. Becker writes in The Hill that the Supreme Court made a “horrendous mistake” giving President Donald Trump absolute power and says the court’s conservative majority must correct this error.
“Their decision in Trump v. United States was naïve at best,” Becker writes. “More likely, the court bought into the right wing’s confusion about the difference between a unitary president and a dictator.”
The 6-3 2004 ruling said that a former President is entitled to a tiered immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.
Becker says “the ruling put the Constitution and the rule of law into the hands of a president who willfully abuses both,” adding that it was “an especially reckless act when President Trump was seeking the presidency again.”
“A serial scofflaw and a 34-count convicted felon, he was clearly running for office to escape trials and jail time for dozens of additional alleged crimes. Trump ran on a platform of personal retribution rather than public service,” Becker adds.
Trump, he writes, wasted little time proving how egregious an error the Supreme Court made, as “under the cloak of presumptive immunity, Trump has become the most thoroughly corrupt president and imminent threat to democracy in American history.”
Trump has “turned the justice system on its head,” for ten “tumultuous months,” Becker says, putting his friends and donors above the law while ordering “malicious prosecutions” against his perceived enemies.
Trump’s pardoning of at least 1,500 people associated with the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol whom Trump referred to as “patriots,” included, according to NPR, dozens who had prior convictions or pending charges, “ranging from rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, manslaughter, production of sexual abuse materials involving children, and drug trafficking.”
At least 5 Jan. 6 defendants, Becker notes, faced new charges including murder and possession of child pornography.
“Trump has normalized what is being called the ‘insider pardon’,” Becker says, pointing to his recent pardon of a crypto-billionaire connected to Trump’s sons’ firm.
“Ordinary citizens are also victims of Trump’s vindictiveness,” he writes, noting that Trump “was accused of denying disaster assistance to three blue states while granting it to three red states.”
Fact-checking website Snopes concluded that Trump “has approved many more major disaster declarations for red states than blue ones during his second term.”
White House budget director Russ Vought ‘s announcement that the administration was cancelling nearly $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects in 16 states that didn’t vote for Trump, is another example of this vindictiveness, Becker writes.
As the New York Times reported, “The cuts underscored the administration’s strategy of putting pressure on Democrats to accept a Republican budget bill and reopen the government.”
As for the Supreme Court’s rationale in handing Trump all this unfettered power, Becker notes that Chief Justice John Roberts argued that a president must be able to “carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution” and take “bold and unhesitating action.”
But, “are lawlessness, extortion and corruption disguised as ‘official acts’ what Roberts had in mind?” Becker wonders, adding that in her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor “accurately described the court’s 6-3 ruling” as “a loaded weapon for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain above the interests of the nation.”
Becker says that “history will not be kind to the Roberts court, nor should it be.”
“It has failed as the republic’s last line of defense against despots. Worse, it handed the tools of autocracy to a man with criminal proclivities and no moral compass. The Supreme Court should admit its error and restore the principle that no one, not even the president, is exempt from the rule of law,” he says.
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