This Independence Day feels different from the others. The United Kingdom delivered a reminder today from across the Atlantic that people do not have to subject themselves to sustained misrule, while here in the United States the Supreme Court chose Monday to hold that American presidents deserve a level of lifelong supremacy above the law normally associated with British monarchs.

I have no real stake in U.K. politics, but as a fan of accountability for elected representatives, I enjoyed seeing British people vote by an overwhelming majority to end 14 years of increasingly-chaotic Conservative rule that left the country objectively poorer and more isolated.

When political leaders fail their constituents, they should be held accountable. And if Labour botches its turn in charge, that party should expect no different.

But six members of the U.S. Supreme Court now believe that when it comes to a president’s compliance with the law, accountability gets flushed into the Potomac if a president’s lawbreaking fell under their “official duties.”

The elastic framework Chief Justice John Roberts crafted in his profoundly dishonorable Trump v. United States opinion rules any president “absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and allows “presumptive immunity” for “acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”

Roberts and his co-conspirators–Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas signed on with all that absurdity, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett partially concurring while disagreeing that presidents deserve an official-duties excuse to suppress certain evidence of their crimes–created this doctrine despite the text of the Constitution saying nothing about presidential immunity.

Instead, they argue that the Constitution’s support of an energetic executive branch trumps all the other inefficiencies it deliberately creates to bog down abuses of power.

The dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, correctly observes that the framers of the Constitution knew how to grant limited immunity when they wrote the Speech or Debate Clause protecting members of Congress. They did no such thing for the Executive Branch. And Federalist 69: The Real Character of the Executive has Alexander Hamilton–a prominent advocate of a strong executive–declaring that presidents could end up in court like anybody else.

“The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law,” Hamilton writes.

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Sotomayor writes in her dissent. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

Roberts dismisses that with this sneering line: “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.'”

Because July Fourth rightly has me feeling disinclined to comply with respect-my-authority arguments, I must ask: How stupid does the Chief Justice think we, meaning the people who pay his salary, are?

We did, in fact, have a president who felt “empowered to violate federal criminal law” when he became the first president in American history to try to overturn an election he clearly lost by deceit and ultimately force. His name is Donald Trump, and he will be on the ballot this November. If you seriously value the freedom we celebrate today, you had better have all of this on your mind when you vote.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/07/04/a-strange-fourth-of-july/