Well, the headline trivializes the issue, and the text is less about the law and more about their continued pro-Trump sycophancy in the fact of his obvious criminal behaviors.
The United States Supreme Court building in Washington PHOTO: EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS
You can’t say the current Supreme Court lacks courage. The safe political play for the Justices would have been to dodge the issue of Donald Trump’s immunity from prosecution. But on Wednesday they decided to hear his appeal on the merits of the law and presidential power, though a ruling is sure to infuriate one side or the other.
Democrats were hoping the Justices would pass on the case and let the recent D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against immunity stand. But as we warnedon Feb. 7, the sweeping and dismissive nature of the D.C. Circuit ruling made it more likely that the High Court would take the case. And here we are.
The Supreme Court put the question it will hear on appeal this way: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
A key part of that sentence is “alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” In denying immunity, the trial judge and the D.C. Circuit panel blew past that point as if it didn’t exist. Yet that was a core part of the Supreme Court’s precedent on presidential immunity in Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982.
That was a civil case involving a lawsuit. But the Court clearly wants to consider whether that precedent applies to criminal prosecutions as well. The Justices in Nixon ruled that a former President had “absolute immunity” from lawsuits for official acts within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties, lest they make it impossible for a President to fulfill those duties while in office.
If a rush of lawsuits could be crippling to a Presidency, what about the threat of post-presidential prosecutions? The D.C. Circuit opinion suggested that this would be no problem for future Presidents because Mr. Trump poses a unique threat to the rule of law. But is the threat of jail less serious than the threat of civil liability?
Once the precedent of prosecuting a former President has been set, as it has by special counsel Jack Smith, why wouldn’t future Justice Departments do the same—starting, perhaps, with former President Biden in 2025? Mr. Trump has already said “Joe would be ripe for indictment.” The statute books are full of laws that a partisan prosecutor might exploit. The immunity question is important far beyond Mr. Trump’s fate.
It takes only four Justices to grant a writ to hear a case, so it isn’t clear how the Justices will come out. But there were no dissents on the order and it directed the D.C. Circuit to delay returning the case to the trial court until the Supreme Court rules. That suggests there are several Justices who want to clean up the appellate court’s legal overreach and consider whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for acts that involve his official duties.
The appeal is a blow to special counsel Smith, who wants to begin his trial over Mr. Trump’s behavior relating to Jan. 6, 2021, before the election. That timeline is now up in the air. The Court set oral argument for the week of April 22, with a ruling likely in June. But the blame for delay doesn’t lie with the Court, which is following its normal process. The fault lies with the Justice Department for waiting so long to bring the case.
If the Court rules that Mr. Trump has some immunity from prosecution, it is likely to remand the case to the trial court for a factual finding on whether Mr. Trump’s alleged criminal acts were part of his official duties. That would take weeks and delay the trial until past the election or into 2025.
Even if the Court rules against Mr. Trump on immunity, the trial judge has suggested she’ll give the parties about three months to prepare for trial. That takes the start date into September. Will Attorney General Merrick Garlandsupport a trial against a presidential candidate running against the AG’s boss only weeks from Election Day? This would fly in the face of Justice Department rules that advise against such politically consequential prosecutions close to an election. It might backfire politically too.
All of this underscores why prosecuting Mr. Trump as a political strategy was so unwise. The former President’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was despicable, and it’s a strong reason to deny him so much power again.
But the lawfare strategy has already helped Mr. Trump win the GOP nomination. Now the most consequential case may be delayed past the election. The Manhattan hush money trial is set to begin on March 25, and Mr. Trump might be convicted by a Manhattan jury. But that case itself is so jerry-rigged and partisan that most voters might ignore it.
The Supreme Court will be attacked no matter how it rules, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already declared that “the Supreme Court is placing itself on trial” by hearing the appeal. No, the Court is doing its job to protect the constitutional order after Democrats decided they couldn’t trust the voters to defeat Mr. Trump.
If the Supreme Court decides that the POTUS is immune from prosecution then Biden should just roll up to Mar-A-Lago and shoot Trump right in the face and run against Nikki Haley instead.
So, let me try to understand, a candidate, who actually kills his opponent, gets to stay in the race?
When the same candidate, reading from teleprompter, says the word (pause) out loud, as Biden did this week, his command of the stage, as a multi-decade, experienced political candidate, confirms his present state of mind.
So, let me try to understand, a candidate, who actually kills his opponent, gets to stay in the race?
Not any candidate, no. If a President has immunity, he can kill his opponent and stay in the race. So Biden would be able to kill Trump with impunity, but Trump as a private citizen would be arrested and tried if he killed Biden. That's what Presidential Immunity is, that's what Trump is fighting for right now, and what he's hoping to be able to do if he's elected.
Not any candidate, no. If a President has immunity, he can kill his opponent and stay in the race. So Biden would be able to kill Trump with impunity, but Trump as a private citizen would be arrested and tried if he killed Biden. That's what Presidential Immunity is, that's what Trump is fighting for right now, and what he's hoping to be able to do if he's elected.
Trump was no longer president when the national archives asked him to return the documents he took, but he seemed to believe that being a former president gives him some kind of lifetime immunity. I'm sure that he'd argue that somehow absolute presidential immunity would apply in this scenario too.
Perhaps I misunderstand but, in listening to clips of the oral arguments, it seemed to me that there are three sorts of "actions" that are in question. The first are actions that originate from Article II of the Constitution. The second are actions vested in the position of the President by Acts of Congress or that are historically implied powers related to a President's official duties. Third are private actions taken to benefit the person in office that are not set forth in either of the first two components. No matter how much a President wants to claim that actions involving their efforts to win re-election are in the interests of the people and, thus, are part of their presidential role, that would seem to be a specious assertion. Even Trump's attorney appeared to acquiesce to that reality under questioning by Jackson and Barrett. Wouldn't that admission greatly erode Trump's claim that "a President should have absolute immunity for anything he/she does" contention? Ah, but this case is more about delaying than resolving issues, isn't it?
“Wouldn't that admission greatly erode Trump's claim that "a President should have absolute immunity for anything he/she does" contention? Ah, but this case is more about delaying than resolving issues, isn't it?”
No, it is “lawfare” — pure and not-so-simple. The courts in New York City and in Georgia have prosecutors dedicated to the destruction of the former president by throwing everything against the wall and watching to see what sticks. Voters are not stupid, and they don’t like what they are seeing. The polls support this theory. The underdog in this scenario is a billionaire (if any money is left) named Trump! Who could have imagined that?
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to ignore the fragility and confusion of Biden — holding him up — as a place holder for the first female POTUS, he must stay the course. The set-up isn’t going to play out, IMHO.
SCOTUS won't give immunity to tRump while Biden is president because then that would mean Biden has it and the House would be impotent in their rants against Biden's "business dealings". If Trump manages to eke out a win, perhaps then they'll grant him King George status and return the US to a monarchy ending the great experiment of democracy and freedom from religious persecution.
The Supreme Court doesn’t need to invent hypotheticals when it comes to trump. There are witnesses who heard him say a staff member should be executed for leaking bad information about him. Maybe people should stop calling him “Mr President” like they do all former presidents cause he can not fathom the difference.
“Wouldn't that admission greatly erode Trump's claim that "a President should have absolute immunity for anything he/she does" contention? Ah, but this case is more about delaying than resolving issues, isn't it?”
No, it is “lawfare” — pure and not-so-simple. The courts in New York City and in Georgia have prosecutors dedicated to the destruction of the former president by throwing everything against the wall and watching to see what sticks. Voters are not stupid, and they don’t like what they are seeing. The polls support this theory. The underdog in this scenario is a billionaire (if any money is left) named Trump! Who could have imagined that?
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to ignore the fragility and confusion of Biden — holding him up — as a place holder for the first female POTUS, he must stay the course. The set-up isn’t going to play out, IMHO.
Who knew -- we don't need judges and juries according to mtierney, just polls. Well, at least until the polls begin to show Trump losing, then I'm sure she'll suddenly never want to talk about polls. And of course, we already know she doesn't care about actual elections. Though again, the oddest part here is why she thinks polls or elections should determine judicial proceedings.
After a day of listening to SCOTUS, I yearned for the wisdom of Laurence Tribe, and was rewarded. He appeared on The Last Word and his words were music to my ears. He said, Justice Kitanji Brown Jackson was right. Worth listening to the entire session on C SPAN.
It looks like it might be 5 - 4 but not sure which way it will fall, unless they kick the can.
“Wouldn't that admission greatly erode Trump's claim that "a President should have absolute immunity for anything he/she does" contention? Ah, but this case is more about delaying than resolving issues, isn't it?”
No, it is “lawfare” — pure and not-so-simple. The courts in New York City and in Georgia have prosecutors dedicated to the destruction of the former president by throwing everything against the wall and watching to see what sticks.
He’s committed so many crimes it’s impossible to charge him for all of them.
“Special counsel Jack Smith should have been reading our contributor David Rivkin. If he’d been reading these pages, he might have foreseen Thursday’s oral argument at the Supreme Court before he indicted Donald Trump. Instead, the argument was a legal defeat for him and the Justice Department that could delay his prosecution past the November election.
“Michael Dreeben, the Biden counsel, told the Justices that Mr. Trump and any other President deserve no immunity from criminal prosecution. But he ran into a skeptical set of Justices focused not on Mr. Trump’s case, but on the implications of the Dreeben-Smith position for the office of the Presidency.
“I’m not concerned about this case,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch. “But I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” He added that “we’re writing a rule for the ages.”
“Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered a similar concern about the future impact of prosecutions on presidential decision-making on controversial subjects.
“Mr. Dreeben’s reply was to suggest that this isn’t a problem because prosecutors don’t bring cases when there isn’t sufficient evidence for a conviction. He also said a President gets good legal advice from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about what official acts are legal, so no President would commit such a crime.
“The Justices made short work of that one, with Justice Samuel Alitoreminding Mr. Dreeben that two Attorneys General were convicted of crimes, and how easy it is for a prosecutor to cajole a grand jury to indict someone.
“Chief Justice John Roberts was especially scathing about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that a President has no immunity. That opinion argued—and Mr. Dreeben defended it—that “a former President can be prosecuted because he’s being prosecuted,” said the Chief. This ignores that Presidents have special obligations and must make decisions that set them part from any federal official, much less an average citizen.
“Oral arguments aren’t always a signal of a future ruling, but it sounds as if a majority is prepared to find that Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for actions that are part of his official duties. The key then is distinguishing between official and private actions, and the Justices may send the case back to trial court to consider the facts regarding the charges and evidence against Mr. Trump.
“The press ignored nearly all of this in the runup to the oral agument, with many calling Mr. Trump’s claim absurd. Credit to the Justices for an educational hearing that focused on the right questions for the Presidency, the separation of powers, and the country.”
ETA -- Ok, in fairness, if Biden himself did the killing, probably not. But as long as he exercised his authority as Command in Chief to order the killing, mtierney says that's a-OK.
ETA -- Ok, in fairness, if Biden himself did the killing, probably not. But as long as he exercised his authority as Command in Chief to order the killing, mtierney says that's a-OK.
Justice Sotomayor: If a president says a rival is corrupt and orders their assassination, "is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?"
Trump lawyer D. John Sauer: "It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act." pic.twitter.com/PXsPyeNC28
Katherine Maher, who became CEO of National Public Radio in March, appears at a technology conference in Portugal in 2023. PHOTO: REUTERS
The CEO of National Public Radio is making the best case yet for ending taxpayer subsidies of public broadcasting. In a remarkable interview with the Journal’s Alexandra Bruell, NPR boss Katherine Maher dismisses criticism from a longtime NPR editor about the outlet’s journalistic failures and also refuses to credit those who question Ms. Maher’s history of wearing leftist politics on her sleeve.
“All of this frankly is a bit of a distraction relative to the transformation our organization needs to undergo in order to best serve our mandate,” Maher said in an interview.
In an essay earlier this month on the news site the Free Press, NPR editor Uri Berliner said the public radio network had lost its way by letting liberal bias skew its coverage. NPR erred on big stories including the origins of Covid-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Israel-Hamas conflict, he wrote. Berliner was suspended last week and subsequently resigned.
Maher said NPR should be open to criticism, but defended the news organization against the charges Berliner laid out.
“We have robust conversations across the organization, including in response to the article,” she said. “Clear and well-reasoned pieces” from reviewers, like a write-up from NPR’s public editor and Poynter executive Kelly McBride that examined coverage of Israel and Gaza, have “found that our journalism is really solid,” Maher said.
News consumers may also remember Ms. McBride as a bit player in another NPR drama in 2022. The biased broadcaster was so determined to smear a conservative Supreme Court justice that NPR insisted on standing behind a story when it didn’t even know what the story was. In this case Ms. McBride really did try to blow the whistle, but NPR simply brushed aside her eminently valid criticism. Now for some odd reason she is still willing to associate herself with the irresponsible outlet.
If Ms. McBride still wants to give it a go as a sort of network ombudsman, there is no shortage of big blown stories to address. Mr. Berliner wrote in his Free Press essay about the network’s coverage of the Trump administration:
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
But according to NPR’s CEO, this cynicism-inducing programming stew just needs to be marketed better. Ms. Bruell has more from Katherine Maher:
What is needed is a more comprehensive business strategy, she said. “How do we actually go out and grow audiences, how do we use data in order to inform our decisions, how do we understand what’s working?” she said.
Part of it will be changing the tone of its broadcasts. Research shows people see the network, which includes over 240 member organizations, as “accurate and intellectual,” she said. “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.”
So NPR’s greatest weakness is that it simply cares too much about being smart and informative?
Speaking of the emerging NPR business strategy, this highlights the main reason why government support is unnecessary. Benjamin Mullin and Jeremy Peters report for the New York Times on the network’s continuing effort to transition from traditional radio broadcasting to various digital services:
An NPR spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said in emails to The Times that the organization had confidence in many of its recent initiatives, including its podcast subscription business, its push to diversify its staff and its efforts to reach listeners digitally. Ms. Lara said three of NPR’s podcasts — “Up First,” “Fresh Air” and “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” — were in Apple’s top 10 subscriber podcasts…
Public radio podcasts, with their distinct blend of reporting and narrative, quickly won over millions of listeners and pioneered a new format. “Serial,” a gritty whodunit from the makers of the public radio show “This American Life,” became a breakout hit, leading to spinoffs and illustrating the promise of podcasting for nonprofit radio organizations.
Today, NPR is the fourth most popular podcast publisher globally, according to Podtrac, with nearly 113 million downloads in March alone. But it also faces many new competitors, including The Times, which bought “Serial” in 2020 to bolster its own growing audio business…
Decades ago, in an age of relative media scarcity, public broadcasting used to justify its existence as a way to provide free over-the-air broadcasting to areas and consumers who had few other options. Now, as if NPR’s audience isn’t already affluent enough, a strategy based on podcasting by definition is serving people who have access to myriad other news and entertainment options. This column holds no brief for the New York Times, but why should the Gray Lady have to compete with a government-backed competitor for the attention of rich liberals—and bid against it for programming?
As for the content, in contrast to NPR’s CEO, even reporters at the New York Times can recognize there’s a debate about bias at NPR:
… its story selection has on occasion left it open to criticism that its focus on race and identity has affected its news judgment. There have been stories, for instance, on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “thin privilege.”
Privileged is the right word for the upscale listeners that taxpayers are still forced to subsidize.
Privileged is the right word for the upscale listeners that taxpayers are still forced to subsidize.
That whole article was a piece of garbage. The gratuitous, ignorant insult of listeners and supporters like myself in that last line, shows the lack of character of the person making that argument.
It’s one thing to euthanize an old sick horse but Kristi Noem wrote about shooting her 14 month old dog because it was "untrainable and dangerous”….."I hated that dog," she wrote, and she recorded how after the dog ruined a hunting trip, she shot it in a gravel pit. Then she decided to kill a goat that she found to be "nasty and mean" as well as smelly and aggressive. She "dragged him to the gravel pit," too, and "put him down." What a bunch of sweet caring Americans…shooting a rival on the steps of the capitol is being a good American.
”Before this column ends, we’ll get to the unmissable fact that anti-Israel, often antisemitic, protests are proliferating at what we amusingly choose to call our most “selective” universities—Columbia, Yale, New York University, Stanford, Berkeley. For the moment, add these North Face tent protests on $75,000-a-year campus quads to the sense among the American public that their country is running off the rails.
“A list of the phenomena laying us low includes: wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), defund the police (a depressing subset of wokeness), conspiracy theories, head-in-the-sand isolationism and a self-centered political polarization typified—from left to right—by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
“Ironically this time of year is associated with hope, amid spring and college graduations—except at the University of Southern California, which, fearing trouble, canceled its commencement speakers and told honorary-degree recipients not to show up. Setting silenced USC aside, a hopeful note one hears at college commencements is that the American system is self-correcting, that despite recurrent stress, it always rights itself. Opinion polls suggest few believe this anymore but—happy spring—it looks as if we may be on the brink of a real counter-revolt against the craziness.
“Last week in the hopelessly gridlocked House, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, facing threats to his job from the chaos caucus, cast his lot with the enough-is-enough caucus. The House passed bills to sustain allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Congress isn’t dead—yet.
“Blue states and cities that looked willing to collapse rather than defend their citizens have begun to push back against progressives’ pro-criminal and antipolice movements.
“At the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York’s just-passed state budget includes measures to crack down on shoplifting. Assaulting a retail worker will be a felony. Larceny charges can be based on the total goods stolen from different stores. Progressives in the state’s Legislature opposed the measures. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, elected in January on restoring law and order (yes, it can be a Democratic issue), last week announced a plan to support policing in the most crime- and drug-plagued neighborhoods.
“March seemed to be a tipping point. The hyperprogressive Council of the District of Columbia, in a city that had become an embarrassing carjacking hellhole, passed an array of anticrime measures. Oregon’s Legislature voted to reverse the state’s catastrophic three-year experiment with drug decriminalization. San Francisco voters approved two measures proposed by, of all people, Mayor London Breed, to ease restrictions on policing and require drug screening for welfare recipients. The results in Los Angeles County’s primary for district attorney strongly suggest progressive George Gascón will be voted out in November.
“In all these places, the reversals by elected officials are driven by the prospect of voters’ turning them out of office. That is the U.S. political system trying to right itself.
“In California, a safety coalition has collected about 900,000 signatures to reverse parts of Proposition 47, the state’s now-notorious 2014 decision to reduce some theft felonies to misdemeanors. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic to overturning a Ninth Circuit decision that bars cities and towns from enforcing vagrancy laws. Though the case emerged from Grants Pass, Ore., which is trying to ban homeless encampments, about three dozen elected officials and organizations in California filed briefs arguing that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling made cleaning up the streets almost impossible.
“News stories since the start of the year have noted that many private companies are rethinking policies on DEI, partly under legal pressure, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down the use of race in college admissions.
“Some in the corporate DEI movement thought they were immune to restraints. No longer. Companies are rediscovering that the constituency most needing inclusion is their customers. The loudest shot across the bow came last week, when Google fired 28 employees after some staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government. Google’s firing statement describes “completely unacceptable behavior.” No one saw that coming.
“All this adds up to a nascent counter-revolt against America’s lurch toward self-destruction. The exception is elite U.S. universities. Their leadership has seen itself as answerable to no one and politically immune.
Robert Kraft, a Columbia grad and owner of the New England Patriots, said this week he will no longer give the school money “until corrective action is taken.”
“If big donors ever regain control of these so-called selective schools, a suggestion: Firing the president won’t close the barn door. Instead, fire the admissions office. What a tragedy to think how many serious high-school students were rejected by Columbia, Yale and NYU, edged out by nonuseful idiots whose chosen major is the political structure of re-education camps.
“Someone has to be a lagging indicator, and these schools are it.”
thank you for again posting the words of the most useless editorial board in the world.