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...
Trump attorney Will Scharf: “We believe the assembly of those alternate slates of electors was an official act of the presidency.”
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 2, 2024
pic.twitter.com/pvZm0jUqih
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…
They know Trump's vulnerable here.
— Tom Hoefling (@TomHoefling) July 2, 2024
Justice Barrett: pic.twitter.com/YKjkHdsDQC
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?
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment