The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he should be shielded from criminal prosecution keeps the justices at the center of election-year controversy for several more months and means any verdict on Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 vote will not come before summer.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he should be shielded from criminal prosecution keeps the justices at the center of election-year controversy for several more months and means any verdict on Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 vote will not come before summer.
The country’s highest court wants the final word on the former president’s assertion of immunity, even if it may ultimately affirm a comprehensive ruling of the lower federal court that rejected Trump’s sweeping claim.
For Trump, Wednesday’s order amounts to another win from the justice system he routinely attacks. The justices’ intervention in the case, Trump v. United States, also marks another milestone in the fraught relationship between the court and the former president.
Cases related to his policies and his personal dealings consistently roiled the justices behind the scenes. At the same time, Trump, who appointed three of the nine justices, significantly influenced the court’s lurch to the right, most notably its 2022 reversal of nearly a half century of abortion rights and reproductive freedom.
This is worse. Bush v Gore was about an election that just happened. It was about an actual case.
Here, the supreme Court took a very narrowly decided case, ignored the decision, and then changed the question being asked to one they want to answer.
Further, the special prosecutor asked them months ago "hey, can you take up this case now rather than delaying everything" which is something previous courts have done (for example, Bush v Gore).
But instead, they delayed, pushed to the lower court, delayed since more,.
It's rat fucking to the extreme. The Supreme Court has no legitimacy.
Quite. And Bush v. Gore was in 2000; in 2001, just four months into office, Bush appointed Roberts to the DC appellate court, which was a very cushy appointment for a lawyer who'd never even been a judge.
Then, in 2005 when a Supreme Court seat finally opened up (Sandra Day O'Connor retired) Bush gave it to John Roberts. Surprise, surprise.
But wait, there's more. When Chief Justice William Rehnquist happened to die during Roberts' SCOTUS confirmation hearings, Bush gave Roberts the Chief Justice position.
In other words, in just four short years after Bush v. Gore, John Roberts rocketed from being nothing but a very well-connected lawyer straight up to Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court -- with nothing more than a brief stint as an appellate court judge in between on his resume, and he even got that with zero prior experience on the bench.
You can thank AG Merrick Garland for allowing this to happen, who did jack shit for 2 years until finally tapping in Jack Smith to actually do something to hold the traitor in chief accountable.
Imagine thinking we don't live in a plutocracy... I hate our public brainwashing "education." We indoctrinate kids into thinking America The Great is a thing, or For the People. Yeah... It's For the rich People...
(Not that I want private schools. I just want public education to be about reality, not an indoctrination into brainwashed subservient society)
Normally when people say that, it's because people can suffer if the the justice takes too long, even if it does eventually give the right result. In this case, it might literally be denied. If Trump wins he's going to do everything in his power to stop all legal proceedings against him and retaliate against anybody who dared to go against him.
I know complex cases can take a while, but really 4 years is too long. Even if there weren't the threat of the election and his being able to pardon himself, it's too long. This really should have been done before the midterm elections two years ago.
If Biden wins, and the Democrats pull off a majority in the House and Senate, they need to pack the court, Fillibuster be damned. Expand it to 11 on July 2025, and 13 in July of 2027. The recent decisions, as unpopular as they are, should build up enough popular support for this.
Then they need to sit down with Republicans and say "Hey! We'll give you a choice. Work with us to reform the Court to add term limits via amendment and make any single sudden vacancy less of a political football, or watch as Dark Brandon appoints 4 Liberal justices in their early 40s to lifetime appointments."
Biden will happily hand Trump the presidency "out of respect for the office" and be immediately arrested for the show trial as Trump begins his 1000 year reign as Lord Emperor.
It shouldn't have taken any time. They should have denied cert.
The fact that at least 4 justices granted it is beyond ridiculous.
Further, they've delayed the hearing until the end of April, which is extremely stupid, they are hearing cases now.
They may not even issue a decision in June with the rest of the cases, it may be next year. And if that's the case and trump is elected, he could stop the hearing in it's tracks by pardoning himself.
They seriously took the position "yeah, the ruling that said in this specific instance with Trump, a president cannot be immune. A perfectly reasonable take given there's so many more mundane reasons why the FBI might convict a former president.
I disagree. I think this question is novel enough that it needs Supreme Court review, not merely letting a lower court ruling stand. That opinion needs to come out at light speed though.
Wealthy people have decades using the slow legal system and other legal loopholes to take advantage of the capitalist system, they made the capitalist system so obviously they made it to work better for them than for the 99%.
Fascists pretend to care about the law, but all they really care about is power. Liberals pretend to care about power, but all they really care about is order.
Wednesday’s action by the high court, made up of six conservatives and three liberals, plainly gives Trump a new measure of success and buys him more time before possible trial on election subversion in Washington, DC.
Overall, the timetable is fast compared to the regular calendar for high court briefing, oral arguments, and eventual resolution, which typically plays out over many months or close to a year.
Smith, earlier this month, cited the nature of the alleged crimes as he urged the justices to let the DC Circuit decision against presidential immunity stand and allow the case to go to trial.
Earlier in February, the Supreme Court held a special oral argument session on whether states could keep Trump off presidential ballots under a constitutional provision barring insurrectionists from holding future office.
The justices appeared ready to reverse a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that would prevent Trump from running for office because of his attempts to overturn the valid 2020 election results.
That case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges a cover-up to conceal payments before the 2016 election to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Trump.
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The foaming at the mouth on this topic in the comments is insane.
You want the Supreme Court to judge this. You can't get any more important than codifying and defining how much power the Office of the President actually has. And having a lower court do that won't carry the weight that that decision needs to have.
Just sit tight people. When the Supreme Court wants to they can move quickly, and something tells me they're going to move quickly on this one.
They scheduled the next stuff to happen toward the end of April. That's not fast. It nearly guarantees the case won't happen before the election. It won't happen at all after the election unless Biden wins. The Supreme Court fucked us here, and they absolutely know that.
And they'll find in the Colorado case that states can't remove insurrectionists until specifically convicted in a criminal trial, so that will also be tucked behind their delay. I even think they'll find that no, presidents are not perpetually above the law, but then stay any case that would kick either kick Trump off the ballot or send him to prison because now it's too close to the election and/or it's being appealed.
There's no real reason to take this case, particularly after refusing earlier, but they don't have to be blatant to get exactly the result they want.
No, the Supreme Court is not "helping" Donald Trump. This is just a rage-bait news piece, and the people who swallow the intimation that the Court is taking the case in order to get Donald Trump elected are falling for it. The Supreme Court isn't playing kingmaker. They are doing their job.
How exactly do you know the motives of the extreme conservative Justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump? Are you a mind reader?
That’s my point.
We don’t know what the motives are of the Supreme Court. Yet because people who want to see Trump removed from the ballot didn’t get the decision they want to see fast enough, they’re inventing conspiracy theories of the Supreme Court manipulating things to benefit Trump, and the media is playing right along, saying they’re “helping” him. It’s precisely this kind of behavior that makes me despise the far right. (Well, not just this behavior, but still.)
I don’t want to see Donald Trump anywhere near the oval office ever again. But I do want to see a decision from the Supreme Court on this specific question, because I want to forever silence the people who have been trying to create a “unitary executive” in the United States.
And they are being unusually speedy. The article even says as much.
Overall, the timetable is fast compared to the regular calendar for high court briefing, oral arguments, and eventual resolution, which typically plays out over many months or close to a year. (Other cases accepted this month for review will not be heard until next fall, with decisions likely in 2025.)