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How do you square your take with the dissenting judges that say it effectively makes the president king?
I guess I just don't understand Sotomayor's response. She says that Trump got the immunity he asked for, but that's not true. He was asking for everything he did as president to be considered an "official act", and they deferred to the lower courts.
It doesn't appear that anything actually changed. I am assuming I am wrong on that, but none of the articles I have read so far have answered that question. There are just a lot of assertions that he was granted absolute immunity, which doesn't match the language of the court's opinion.
I would have preferred that they draw a line on specific acts not being considered "official acts", especially as we draw the line between Trump's presidency and his 2020 reelection campaign. I'm just not seeing a lot of honest discourse as to what this decision actually means from a legal perspective.
Well, that's exactly the problem that has everyone up in arms here. They have made this ruling but conveniently failed to rule on what constitutes an "official" act. Therefore whenever a major ruling has to be done about this, they can decide at that time whether an act was official or not based on what flavor of president they're ruling for or against, and until then the lower courts can take the heat off the SCOTUS directly by just ruling that everything Trump has ever done is legal because he was president once.
It's a very transparently partisan ruling, setting the stage for further partisan ruling in the future by being extremely vague about what their ruling actually is. This ruling boils down to "the president is allowed to do anything he wants when we say so, and is subject to rule of law only when we say so, and whether we say so will be determined after the acts in question." In this way the conservative-packed supreme court can easily enable a conservative president or trap a liberal one.
What it does set up though is an official legal stand to say that the supreme Court gets to decide what's "official". Meaning they can decide that all Trump's actions are official and all of Biden's (or whatever dem president) are not
This was already the arrangement. That's why Trump was even at the Supreme Court. He was asking for them to decide that everything he did as president was an "official act". They gave the right to decide that back to the lower courts, where it could theoretically come back to them with a more specific set of actions that they need to decide upon.
Of course, the idea that the SCOTUS is corrupted to the point that they would protect Republicans and sabotage Democrats is a worth discussing, but that seems like a wholly different issue that we allowed the highest court in the country to be corrupted by overt partisanship.
It doesn't seem so much that the claim is that the SCOTUS gave Trump immunity, but that nobody trusts the court system to draw that line to begin with.
The American justice system works on the idea of precedence. Cases have ruling decisions and the interpretation of the law that comes from those decisions becomes law. It wasn't clear before the ruling because there was no precedent. Now the precedent that has been set that going forward, the supreme Court (currently politically motivated to the right) will have final say over whether or not a sitting or former president may be tried and prosecuted for decisions they made or actions they took in office. What would have been the correct thing to do with the least political implication (the supreme Court is meant to be free from political biases) would have been to define what actions are illegal according to the law. But they didn't want to define actions as legal or illegal, they want the ability to justify them making case by case judgements which give them the opportunity to push their aforementioned bias.
I think your confusion is warranted, because it's not clear how SCOTUS' decision is different from what the Constitution comes right out and says. On the surface, it does seem to just reaffirm what we already know, and maybe the liberal justices are just whinging.
The trick is that they did it in a way that causes a lot more work in the courts. In turn, that means Trump's trials get delayed further.
Nobody sane is going to argue that getting a hostile crowd to surround and storm the capitol while an important procedural vote is taking place is an official act of a President. But now it has to be ruled on, specifically, and that's one more thing to add to the pile before the obvious verdict can be reached.
Trump's lawyers have already filed an argument in the hush money case that certain points of evidence should be removed because they were official acts. If so, that would potentially result in a mistrial, and so the only Trump criminal case that went forward would have to be redone.
What worries me is that if is the case that the liberal justices are just whinging, then we're in even deeper shit, because that would suggest that the liberal justices are making decisions directly in the context of restraining the threat of a future Trump presidency, and that means every single member of the SCOTUS has abandoned being an impartial constitutional judge...