Tuesday, 2 July 2024

The Bigly Immunity


Having waited to the last possible moment to release it, the Supreme Court of the United States has just issued it’s bonkers ruling on Donald Trump’s immunity with all the aplomb of a toddler showing its mummy what it has left in its potty. 

The timing could not be more cynical.  At the last minute of their latest judicial term and just before Donald Trump’s sentencing in New York and the Republican Convention.  It was previously a possibility that the Convention would not have been able to confer the nomination in person on Donald because with the sentencing on the 11th and the Convention on the 15th Trump might have been in prison.

However, not content with defining the President’s “Core” Acts as Immune from prosecution and any acts that may also be vaguely related to those as probably Immune as well, the SCROTUM – sorry SCOTUS – has decided to throw a number of legal testicles – sorry, I mean curveballs at the lower courts as well.  In particular prosecutors are now no longer allowed to use “testimony or private records of the President or his advisors” as evidence in criminal proceedings. 

This immediately means that the verdict in Donald Trump’s Hush Money / Election Interference case may be questioned on the grounds that the jury saw evidence that should not have been submitted.  Since, like the Pope when speaking ex cathedra, the position of the Supreme Court is that it never makes a mistake and only reinterprets what has gone before …it’s rulings now should have been applied in the past as in SCOTUS world nothing ever changes, it just wasn’t noticed before.  Except when the SCOTUS actually did “overturn” Roe V Wade as "egregiously wrong from the start" explaining that this was because its reasoning was "exceptionally weak".  In much the same way that the RCC now purports that Limbo never existed and animals do have souls it was just the theology that was misunderstood…

Anyway, the upshot is that Trump’s lawyers were straight off the starting block at challenging the conviction and sentencing has had to be put back… incidentally, if official records can’t be used to prosecute a President because they’re inadmissible in Court does that mean the Watergate tapes couldn’t have been used to prosecute Nixon (if he hadn’t been pardoned)?

Not content with just this legal hand grenade the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Smith issued a “concurring opinion” having a go at the legality of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s job – suggesting that “there are serious questions whether the Attorney General violated the structure …” of the constitution by appointing him.  Which wasn’t even a question on which he’d been asked to adjudicate but just happens to be one of the nebulous delaying arguments that Judge Aileen Canon has been cogitating in her attempt to find reasons not to fix a Trial date in the Classified Documents case …If the Office of the Special Council is illegal someone should tell them because they have their own official government website https://www.usa.gov/agencies/office-of-special-counsel#:~:text=The%20Office%20of%20Special%20Counsel,protect%20government%20employees%20and%20whistleblowers.

It all goes to show how closely the MAGA movement has wrapped it's corrupt tentacles around the American institutions placing Trump's flunkies in positions to later help him in his machinations... his plans to be a Dictator were obvious as early as November 2020 ...I said there would be a coup but no one listened until... people don't want to believe the worst of people but if there is a person with no redeeming features it probably is Donald Trump.  A convicted crook, a convicted felon, a serial libeler, a man who boasts of molesting women and according to one court probably an actual rapist...



Some had argued that the SCOTUS wouldn’t find in favour of Presidential Immunity for criminal acts because it would undermine its own power… but Judges on the Court are probably more interested in their position than in power… After all, like all Dictators from day one Trump will still need a Judiciary.  I mean, all those political dissidents aren’t going to try and execute themselves…  If you really want to scare yourself read Project 2025… 


Leaving aside the issue of whether Presidential Criminal Immunity exists and to what degree there is also the question of whether it needs to exist.  UK Prime Ministers have no immunity from prosecution (being only “first among equals”) and the system seems to function fine with Boris being booted out etc… One argument advanced for Presidential Immunity is something along the lines that “If a President was to order his minions assassinate a terrorist leader abroad he shouldn’t be prosecuted for that”.  But such a prosecution would only take place within the jurisdiction where it happened anyway (where there is unlikely to an extradition treaty) and unlike Mr Blair who could have been prosecuted by the ICC if they had a “definition of aggressive war” which was strangely not at hand at the time a prosecution was attempted …the US isn’t even a signatory to the ICC … so how could such a bizarre set of events happen anyway?

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