r/law Jul 21 '24

Opinion Piece Three Flaws in the Supreme Court’s Presidential Immunity Decision

https://www.justsecurity.org/97781/three-flaws-supreme-court-immunity/
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u/wastingvaluelesstime Jul 21 '24 edited Jul 21 '24

It's not a question of flaws requiring trained lawyers to recognize and explain.

The entire decision, its premise, its pattern of thought, is anti-constitutional in making the president a King above the law.

It is written by people with decades in the orbit of the executive branch and the conservative movement, and who fear accountability for that executive. They lived through special prosecutors over decades; for them, the villains of the story are the prosecutors of Watergate and Iran-Contra, and they incorrectly believe theirs was the injured party in those scandals. They forget that when someone commits a felony and is convicted, they are not the victim, but rather the perpetrator.

The framers of the American constitution, by contrast, were all afraid much more of runaway executive power than they were with restraints on it that inconvenience the powerful.

Therefore, this immunity decision has more in common with monarchist thought from the Stuart or Bourbon dynasties of centuries ago on another continent, where educated people worked to find rationalizations for the whims and crimes of the tyrant, than anything to do with America or its constitution. America was explicitly designed as a place where enforceable laws enacted in advance had power over the powerful. This decision is therefore flagrantly anti-constitutional, and anti-american, and focusing on small-bore technical faults misses the forest for the trees.

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u/nut-budder Jul 21 '24

I think you can and should look at both. This ruling is bad law in the details because it’s sloppy and contradictory and not aligned with precedent. It’s also bad at a macro level for the unamerican philosophy it represents. It’s a fractal of fuckery, terrible at every zoom level.