‘The President is now a king above the law,’ Sotomayor writes in Trump immunity dissent
The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday in former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case makes it all but certain that the Republican will not face trial in Washington ahead of the November election.
The Supreme Court did not dismiss — as Trump had wanted — the indictment alleging he illegally schemed to cling to power after he lost to President Joe Biden. But the ruling still amounts to a major victory for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, whose legal strategy has focused on delaying the proceedings until after the election.
Trump posted in all capital letters on his social media network shortly after the decision was released: “BIG WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY. PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!”
The timing of the trial matters because if Trump defeats Biden, he could appoint an attorney general who would seek the dismissal of this case and the other federal prosecutions he faces. Or Trump could potentially order a pardon for himself.
The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — sharply criticized the majority’s opinion in scathing dissents. Sotomayor gave a dramatic speech as she read her dissent from the bench, at times shaking her head and gritting her teeth as she said the conservative majority wrongly insulated the U.S. president as “a king above the law.”
“Ironic isn’t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them,” Sotomayor said.
The dissenting justices said the majority decision makes presidents immune from prosecution for acts such as ordering Navy seals to assassinate a political rival, organizing a military coup to hold onto power or accepting a bribe in exchange for a pardon.
“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” Sotomayor wrote.
In a separate dissenting opinion, Jackson said the majority’s ruling “breaks new and dangerous ground.”
“Stated simply: The Court has now declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can (under circumstances yet to be fully determined) become a law unto himself,” Jackson wrote.
The majority opinion accused the liberal justices of “fear mongering” and striking a “tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.”