SCOTUS to Decide Trump Immunity Claim  04/25 06:23

   On the left and right, Supreme Court justices seem to agree on a basic truth 
about the American system of government: No one is above the law, not even the 
president.

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- On the left and right, Supreme Court justices seem to 
agree on a basic truth about the American system of government: No one is above 
the law, not even the president.

   "The law applies equally to all persons, including a person who happens for 
a period of time to occupy the Presidency," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in 2020.

   Less than a year earlier, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a federal 
trial judge, wrote, "Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 
years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings."

   But former President Donald Trump and his legal team are putting that 
foundational belief to the test on Thursday when the high court takes up the 
Republican's bid to avoid prosecution over his efforts to overturn his 2020 
election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

   Trump's lawyers argue that former presidents are entitled to absolute 
immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, they say, politically motivated 
prosecutions of former occupants of the Oval Office would become routine and 
presidents couldn't function as the commander in chief if they had to worry 
about criminal charges.

   Lower courts have rejected those arguments, including a unanimous 
three-judge panel on an appeals court in Washington, D.C. And even if the high 
court resoundingly follows suit, the timing of its decision may be as important 
as the outcome. That's because Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican 
presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the 
November election, and the later the justices issue their decision, the more 
likely he is to succeed.

   The court typically issues its last opinions by the end of June, which is 
roughly four months before the election.

   The election interference conspiracy case brought by special counsel Jack 
Smith in Washington is just one of four criminal cases confronting Trump, the 
first former president to face prosecution. He already is standing trial in New 
York on charges that he falsified business records to keep damaging information 
from voters when he directed payments to a former porn star to keep quiet her 
claims that they had a sexual encounter.

   Smith's team says the men who wrote Constitution never intended for 
presidents to be above the law and that, in any event, the acts Trump is 
charged with -- including participating in a scheme to enlist fake electors in 
battleground states won by Biden -- aren't in any way part of a president's 
official duties.

   Nearly four years ago, all nine justices rejected Trump's claim of absolute 
immunity from a district attorney's subpoena for his financial records. That 
case played out during Trump's presidency and involved a criminal 
investigation, but no charges.

   Justice Clarence Thomas, who would have prevented the enforcement of the 
subpoena because of Trump's responsibilities as president, still rejected 
Trump's claim of absolute immunity and pointed to the text of the Constitution 
and how it was understood by the people who ratified it.

   "The text of the Constitution ... does not afford the President absolute 
immunity," Thomas wrote in 2020.

   The lack of apparent support on the court for the sort of blanket immunity 
Trump seeks has caused commentators to speculate about why the court has taken 
up the case in the first place.

   Phillip Bobbitt, a constitutional scholar at Columbia University's law 
school, said he worries about the delay, but sees value in a decision that 
amounts to "a definitive expression by the Supreme Court that we are a 
government of laws and not of men."

   The court also may be more concerned with how its decision could affect 
future presidencies, Harvard law school professor Jack Goldsmith wrote on the 
Lawfare blog.

   But Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, 
said the court never should have taken the case because an ideologically 
diverse panel of the federal appeals court in Washington adequately addressed 
the issues.

   "If it was going to take the case, it should have proceeded faster, because 
now, it will most likely prevent the trial from being completed before the 
election. Even Richard Nixon said that the American people deserve to know 
whether their president is a crook. The Supreme Court seems to disagree," 
Roosevelt said.

   The court has several options for deciding the case. The justices could 
reject Trump's arguments and unfreeze the case so that U.S. District Judge 
Tanya Chutkan can resume trial preparations, which she has indicated may last 
up to three months.

   The court could end Smith's prosecution by declaring for the first time that 
former presidents may not be prosecuted for official acts they took while in 
office.

   It also might spell out when former presidents are shielded for prosecution 
and either declare that Trump's alleged conduct easily crossed the line or 
return the case to Chutkan so that she can decide whether Trump should have to 
stand trial.

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   Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at 
https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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