by Jeff Childers
Clueless, low-information Democrats are wailing that the Judges anointed a Presidential King by creating a three-tier test under which —wait for it— Presidents can be prosecuted for crimes. Democrats are acting like this is a revolutionary improvement of the Presidential position. But that, like nearly everything else partisan Democrats say, is a lie.
What was the rule before the Supreme Court issued its decision? Well, before Trump, no president was ever prosecuted for a crime. Not for droning an Iraqi wedding. Not for illegal wars. Not even for jaywalking or running lawn sprinklers on a Tuesday.
Presidential prosecutions never ever happened.
Don’t miss this: before Trump, presidents obviously enjoyed de facto total immunity. The unspoken rule that everyone followed was that nobody can prosecute the President, or even a former President.
During the period the de facto total immunity rule reigned, the Supreme Court never had to address Presidential immunity. There were no cases; that’s how absolute the immunity was. But now that the Court has crafted a de jure (legal) rubric, Presidents who do illegal things can be prosecuted. They can now be prosecuted much more easily, in fact. Just not for nuisance claims, like the creative, trumped-up claims brought against President Trump, such as for notating his check stubs wrong.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Evidence shows President Obama was involved in the now-discredited Russia Dossier matter, which was used as a false predicate to spy on the Trump campaign for partisan political purposes. Evidence suggests Obama knew the Dossier was fake, purchased by the Clinton campaign. Yesterday’s new 3-tier test provides a clear procedure for prosecuting Obama for those very serious allegations.
In other words, the High Court incinerated de facto Presidential immunity, and replaced it with a clear de jure prosecutorial process. Former and future Presidents susceptible to more serious crimes than Trump’s are now fair game. I even got a very reluctant AI chatbot to agree:
The irony! By bringing all these silly, creative claims against President Trump for keeping a few boxes of “classified documents,” and because his bookkeeper wrote the wrong thing on a check stub, the Supreme Court got an unprecedented opportunity to end forever the silent, implicit protection previously enjoyed by every other previous President. That de facto absolute immunity is gone, never to return.
And now it’s open season on serious crimes committed by Presidents.
If President Trump wins the election, this decision provides exactly the right tool his DOJ needs to prosecute the last twenty years of Presidential malfeasance and abuses of authority. It almost seems like Trump planned it this way. In hindsight, it couldn’t have gone any better for Trump in the big picture. When Trump’s DOJ brings its first charges against Biden and Obama, the media cannot wail about it being “unprecedented.” He’ll just be following the law.
Beyond those long-term benefits for President Trump, the decision also placed a massive granite capstone on out-of-control Presidential authority. All future Presidents, Trump included, must now consider potential criminal liability under the new Trump v. US standard. The new rule will make Presidents much more careful when acting outside their Constitutional authority, like when they mandate vaccine shots or something, just as a random example.
So … it’s not even so much that Trump won. The American People won.
But the good news doesn’t stop there! Justice Thomas’s concurrence slid an assassin’s knife into Trump’s two most dangerous criminal cases.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon sits in the Southern District of Florida and presides over the Mar-a-Lago raid case. She is the only Trump judge the Democrats dislike, intensely, because she has been ruling fairly. Judge Cannon right now is considering the issue of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s authority. And Justice Thomas just penned an entire concurring opinion carefully analyzing Prosecutor Smith’s authority. Justice Thomas’s conclusion was that Smith lacks the Constitutional basis to prosecute his two Trump cases. Yesterday’s headline from the New York Sun:
Justice Thomas’s astonishing concurrence is not binding law. That’s not what the case was about. But it just handed a shrink-wrapped legal package to Judge Cannon, that will fuel her decision against the Special Prosecutor. After all, she now has a complete roadmap dished up by a sitting Supreme Court Justice.
Justice Thomas was Judge Cannon’s law clerk.
If Judge Cannon follows Justice Thomas’s Constitutional roadmap —and why wouldn’t she?— both of Prosecutor Smith’s cases will probably be dismissed. Democrats couldn’t fairly criticize Judge Cannon’s decision to dismiss, because she won’t just be some rebellious federal judge in South Florida. Her opinion would be consistent with a Supreme Court Justice’s analysis. And when the government inevitably appeals, in light of Thomas’s concurrence, the Eleventh Circuit would be under great pressure to affirm her decision. Then the majority of the Supreme Court could decline to hear a further appeal, since the Court has essentially already weighed in.
If it isn’t quite checkmate, it looks a lot like “mate in two.” Yesterday’s opinion greatly helped Trump, both by complicating his other cases apart from Prosecutor Smith’s, and also by stabbing Agent Smith’s two cases in the heart.
But beyond any benefits to President Trump, we the people benefited the most.
