Don't delay justice for Trump
In every possible way, the Supreme Court has assisted the indicted president and impaired the democratic process by causing the delay that the defendant wants. The Court’s monkey-wrench tools include:
· Delay taking up the immunity case until early 2024, when it could have taken it immediately in the fall of 2023 after the matter had been fully argued and briefed in the District and Appellate Courts. Or it could have waited until after the outcome of Trump’s trial to see if the facts presented any constitutional issue.
· Staying all preparations for a trial over the extraneous or hypothetical issue of purely “official acts” not present in the pending criminal charges all relating to Jan. 6.
· In February, delaying the hearing date to be on the term’s last possible day, April 25.
· Delay now in deciding the case until who knows when. Compare what happened in 2000, when the Supreme Court selected a conservative president one day after hearing the case brought by Al Gore and just before he could have won at the polls.
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The Court’s fundamental mistake is taking a case that is not a live “case or controversy” because the facts do not involve violation of any purely official act that conceivably might receive immunity. The government charges only personal (and perhaps mixed personal and official) criminal acts involving re-election. Since there is no case to be decided, any ruling by the court will be hypocritical “legislating from the bench.” This is exactly what conservative justices criticize in others, as shown in their Dobbs decision striking down the Roe decision because it was supposedly legislated from the bench by activist Justice Warren Burger.
The conservative justices also have abandoned their principles of insistence on originalism and/or textualism to decide cases interpreting the Constitution. In fact, there is no historical or “originalism” precedent for allowing a president to commit any crime with immunity, and in the Constitution there is no textual basis for compelling a ruling that a president cannot be convicted of a crime without first being convicted upon impeachment.
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Justice Gorsuch proclaims, "We're writing a rule for the ages!” The truth is that he demonstrates grandiose activism. Blocking a timely trial on the facts of Jan. 6 will prevent American voters from fully knowing what the Defendant did. The conservative justices seem blithe enablers of a sociopath who proclaims he will tear up the Constitution and be a dictator if he returns to office in 2025. These justices seem quite unconcerned that they may be implicated in throwing away the world’s oldest democracy and creating a criminal autocracy for the ages.
Richard Emory is a resident of Boynton Beach.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Supreme Court plays dirty in hindering Trump trials
