Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said Monday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that the Supreme Court ruling in former President Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case for all practical purposes was “absolute immunity.”
Tribe said, “I agree with Speaker Pelosi and Justice Sotomayor, this is a devastating blow to our system of government. In fact, probably the most eloquent and elaborate dissent, which I haven’t seen quoted in the press much. It’s that of Justice Brown Jackson who said that it is a five alarm fire for self-government under democracy and the reason is that the court was really flying the flag of the Constitution upside down.”
He added, “It was suggesting that just because an act is official, that is it’s something a president can do, but that others can’t do, that creates a cloak of immunity. That’s upside down. It is worse to use the cloak of presidential authority to commit ordinary crimes for which the rest of us would go to jail than it is to do things that are purely personal. So the sliver that has been left to Jack Smith, that is taking the threads of this indictment and in a hearing before Judge Chutkan, trying to show which ones like contacts with Rudy Giuliani, or certain discussions with state officials, which ones are truly private. That’s really a fig leaf, simply a way for the court to tap itself on the shoulder and say we’re not granting absolute immunity. I beg to differ, for all practical purposes, this is absolute immunity. It’s dangerous and it means we have to be even more careful to never to elect a president who would think let alone say he wants to be a dictator on day one.”
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