Friday, April 26, 2024

The Supreme Court Has Found the Rock and the Hard Place.

All indications are that the Justices will either invent the idea that Trump has sweeping immunity, or they'll send it back to a lower court.  Either decision creates a problem for Trump.  And for the Court.

The analogy that has been floated in this case is whether or not Trump would have immunity if he had political rivals killed.  His lawyer says he would, but this immunity would be retracted if Trump was then impeached and convicted.

Keeping in mind how enraged are most Americans over the Supreme Court's removal of their rights to abortion, and considering how much further enraged they would be if the Supreme Court told them King Donnie can do whatever he wants, it becomes more or less unfathomable that Donnie gets elected this coming November, if it's not unfathomable already.

But let's say, for purpose of discussion, he does.  But Congress becomes more Democratic.  Donnie not only gets impeached immediately, but the Senate, unlike the one headed by Mitch McConnell, who said he didn't care what the House did about impeachment, because the Republican Senate wouldn't convict him anyway, does in fact convict him.  Immunity gone.

Or Donnie somehow, unimaginably, gets elected, and Congress shifts right, too.  At that point, 250 years after we detached ourselves from King George III, we're under the autocracy of King Donnie and his yes-people (if he needs them, and doesn't just discharge them), and the "democratic experiment" is over.  We lost.  We failed.

Or, if the Supreme Court says a president has immunity, and can have rivals assassinated, why can't Biden have Trump assassinated?  Biden wouldn't, because he's not like that, but if the SCOTUS says he could, and if he does it now, the House will impeach him, and the Senate, if it was as amoral as the one McConnell led, wouldn't convict him.

But the fact is that Donnie himself knows he's not immune.  The last time he lost an election, he did the right thing, at first.  He brought the matter to the courts.  Sixty or sixty-one times.  Sure, there was the famous call to Raffensperger in Georgia, and the denied request of Pence, but he didn't take matters in hand, and declare himself the winner, as if he was immune.  (Or have Biden and Harris assassinated.)  He knows he's not immune.

And the SCOTUS doesn't have to send this matter back to a lower court.  It's already been there.  The Supreme Court of Colorado already ruled against Donnie.  It said he was guilty, had violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and couldn't hold any office.  The Colorado Supreme Court simply suspended its decision for a little while, because Donnie wanted to appeal to the SCOTUS.

So, what's the SCOTUS to do?  They shouldn't have agreed to hear this case, and it's going to be more or less impossible for them (the right wing supermajority) to get themselves out of it without making fools of themselves more than they've been doing.


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