The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court on Monday further delayed the federal trial of Donald Trump, with a ruling on the limits of a president’s criminal immunity that makes it virtually impossible to hold the trial before the election in four months.
• Read also: Trump is now ‘a king above the law,’ says Supreme Court justice
By deciding on February 28 to take up this question, then by scheduling the debates nearly three months later, the highest court in the United States had already considerably postponed the federal trial of the former Republican president for attempting to illegally reverse the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.
With the voice of the six conservative judges against that of the three progressives, the Court considers that “the president does not enjoy any immunity for his unofficial acts” but that he “is entitled at least to a presumption of immunity for his official acts.”
It therefore refers the case back to the court of first instance to determine which acts are potentially immune from criminal prosecution, with the prosecution having to demonstrate that they are not when they were carried out in the exercise of its functions.
This decision is “a great victory for our democracy and our Constitution,” Donald Trump immediately hailed.
The Republican candidate “thinks he is above the law,” Joe Biden’s campaign team responded, saying the decision “does not change the facts (…): Donald Trump cracked after losing the 2020 election and encouraged a mob to reverse the results of an election,” according to a campaign adviser.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent joined by her two progressive colleagues, criticizes the majority of the Court, in its “obsession” that a president can act without fear, “for ignoring the equivalent need for restraint.”
Beyond the case of Donald Trump, this decision has “irrevocably altered the relationship between the president and the people he serves,” she writes, transforming him into “a king above the law in every use of his official power.”
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“Manual”
According to Steven Schwinn, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Illinois at Chicago (north), “to the extent that Donald Trump was trying to drag this out until after the election, he was completely successful.”
“The court’s decision provides an obvious blueprint for a president who would seek to immunize himself from prosecution for potentially criminally wrongful actions simply by intertwining them with official actions,” he said.
The entire procedure for this trial, initially scheduled to start on March 4 and postponed indefinitely, had already been suspended for four months.
During the debates, while the judges were generally skeptical of the absolute immunity claimed by the Republican candidate, several, particularly among conservatives, insisted on the long-term repercussions of their decision.
“We are writing a rule for posterity,” Neil Gorsuch observed, referring to the unprecedented nature of the question.
“This case has enormous implications for the future of the presidency and the country,” added his colleague Brett Kavanaugh.
Targeted by four separate criminal proceedings, Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops to be tried as late as possible, in any case after the presidential election.
He was found guilty on May 30 by the New York courts of “aggravated false accounting to conceal a conspiracy to subvert the 2016 election.” He will be sentenced on July 11.
But this first criminal conviction, unprecedented for a former American president, in the least politically burdensome of the four procedures, now risks also being the only one before the vote.
Because through numerous appeals, Donald Trump’s lawyers have managed to postpone until further notice the other trials, at the federal level for withholding classified documents after he left the White House and before the courts in the key state of Georgia (southeast) for electoral interference in 2020.
If re-elected, Donald Trump could, once inaugurated in January 2025, order a halt to federal prosecutions against him.
