A Supreme Court Says What the Constitution Says

The Trump immunity decision was delivered on Monday. It immediately provoked primal screams throughout the Democratic Party and their captured media, in seeming chorus with the three Supreme Court justices who dissented. Yet, it amounted, in almost all respects, to Chief Justice Roberts simply reading the U.S. Constitution aloud. He didn’t need the teleprompter Joe Biden needed for his own four- and one-half minute nationally televised fit about it, Monday night. As usual, Biden’s teleprompter issued a lie a second, leading with the claim that Trump supporters had tried to hang the Vice-President on January 6, 2021. The U.S. Supreme Court was called “lawless.”

By sticking with our founding document, Chief Justice John Roberts, and the majority of 5 other justices saved the U.S. presidency and with it, the ability to right this nation, which had been flooded with illegal and republic destroying lawfare ever since Donald Trump first walked down the escalator in 2015. The Court ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution when exercising their core responsibilities as specified in Article II of the Constitution, a presumption of immunity for their official acts, which can be rebutted, and no immunity for purely private actions. Otherwise, every president in the future would endure what Donald Trump has endured, multiple criminal prosecutions initiated through his or her successor, to eliminate them from the political sphere. The nation would quickly collapse into the banana republic envisioned by the Barack Obama-led Democratic Party for whom the lawless exercise of political power has become the norm. Justice Thomas used his concurring opinion to point out that there is no constitutional basis for Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s appointment, an argument which will increasingly be emphasized in both of Smith’s cases against Donald Trump.

This case, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump for the events of January 6, now goes back down to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for factual determinations as to what alleged actions of President Trump concerning January 6^th fall under the three respective definitions. The decision also has major implications in other Trump lawfare cases, including his New York conviction, where his attorneys appear to be examining whether evidence introduced in the case and impacting the verdict was improperly characterized and introduced. As a result, Trump’s sentencing has been postponed to September 18^th. It is extremely unlikely that there will be any other Trump trials before the November election.

One of the more far-reaching results in the case concerns the relationship between the President and the Department of Justice and the President and the so-called “interagency” of intelligence and military advisors. Since Watergate, a governmental myth has developed that the Justice Department is an independent actor under the Constitution and interference by a President with the DOJ constitutes an impeachable and possibly criminal offense. The entire Russiagate investigation of Trump by Special Counsel Robert Mueller stemmed from Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and whether that action constituted obstruction of justice. To conduct the lawless war on terror and foreign lawfare operations, Barack Obama and Eric Holder souped up the National Security Division of the DOJ and immunized that unit from any intrusions by Congress or the DOJ Inspector General. It was from that unit that the ongoing coup against the Trump presidency was conducted. Similarly, in Trump’s first impeachment, he was repeatedly accused of ignoring the wisdom of the vaunted “interagency” in initially refusing to arm Ukraine and seeking information about Joe and Hunter Biden’s corrupt Burisma schemes. For exercising independent presidential power over foreign affairs, the Democrat impeachment managers argued, in effect, Trump could be impeached.

 The Constitution, as Justice Roberts noted, says otherwise. “Investigative and prosecutorial decision-making is ‘the special province of the Executive Branch and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President. Article II, Section 1. . .. The President’s management of the Executive Branch, requires him to have unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates—such as the Attorney General—in their most important duties.”  In providing this all-important constitutional guideline, the Supreme Court banned those parts of Jack Smith’s January 6^th Trump indictment which criminalized Trump’s demand for an investigation of vote fraud and threatened firing or replacement of DOJ officials who refused to comply. They also attacked, by implication, the first impeachment since the President has exclusive power to conduct foreign affairs.

Referring to the significance of the case institutionally and historically, Justice Roberts wrote: “In his Farewell Address, George Washington reminded the Nation, that ‘a Government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of Liberty is indispensable.’  A government ‘too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction,’ he warned, would lead to the ‘frightful despotism’ of ‘alternate determination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge.’  The way to avoid that cycle, he explained, was to ensure government powers remained ‘properly distributed and adjusted.’”  The president, Roberts noted, is not above the law. “But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.”

The three dissenting justices, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagan claimed that this reading of the Constitution itself means that future Presidents will become lawless criminals, echoing the nonsense in the D.C. Circuit Court decision on this issue to the effect that Trump can and will order Seal Team 6 to assassinate his opponents.

Roberts countered that “the dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.’  The dissents overlook the more likely prospect, of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next.”  Roberts points out that the conspiracy law, charged against Trump in the J6 case is an extremely broad and almost boundless law which any enterprising prosecutor could use to criminalize a president’s political choices in enforcing some aspect of federal law.