Liberal indignation at the Supreme Court decision to grant Donald Trump immunity is undermining democracy.
By
Lee Siegel
American liberals are howling in indignation over the Supreme Court’s decision to extend immunity to the former president Donald Trump for his alleged attempts to impede the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. They shouldn’t be. Rather, they should consider the decision good news in the wake of a debate performance that convinced most of America, and most of the world, that Biden is mentally unfit to serve as president. Now, in the event of a Trump victory, Biden will perhaps not be victimised by the same fanatical attempts to put him behind bars, on account of actions he took as president, that Trump has been subject to almost from the minute he entered the White House in 2016.
Imagine that the Supreme Court had sanctioned the prosecution of Trump for his actions on 6 January 2021. The country could well have been facing, in the weeks preceding the November election, one presidential candidate shuttling between criminal trials in Washington and Georgia and the other candidate fleeing the media as his handlers tried to conceal his accelerating mental decline from the public. America would have been in something like dual receiverships, delivered into the hands of judges for the Republican candidate, and doctors for the Democratic one.
It is telling that John Roberts, the justice writing for the conservative majority behind the decision, carefully described the ruling in legal terms, referring to possible consequences for future presidents. The liberal minority expressed its dissent with an apocalypticism that was nothing like the sobriety expected from a judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice. It was more like the anti-Trump hysteria that became an entertaining and lucrative staple of Trump’s reign. “The president is now a king above the law,” wrote Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the decision was “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance”.
Roberts was more sanguine. He explained that the decision conferred immunity on official actions – Trump merely had conversations, as president, about using arcane laws to challenge the election results. But he and the other justices in the majority left the door open to the lower courts prosecuting Trump for his unofficial acts.
