has faced a barrage of litigation and judicial proceedings across the country. Some of it was civil, such as theattorney general’s suit against the Trump Organization for inflating property valuations, E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit, and the gambit to use Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to kick Trump off the ballot. Presidents have faced civil actions before.
One court, however, has been unmoved by the Left’s pleas that Trump must face a jury of his peers before voters mark their ballots this fall. Unfortunately for the “resistance,” it happens to be the highest court in the land. While it may have enjoyed some success elsewhere, the scheme to litigate Trump into oblivion ran aground on the shoals of 1 First St. NE.
Laurence Tribe, a retired Harvard Law School professor and for decades one of the luminaries of the legal Left, gave the game away in hisabout the immunity judgment. The court, he howled, “dispensed with the rule of law by effectively depriving the American people of crucial information we should have had before the November election.
With a 2024 trial just about dead, some members of the legal resistance have begun putting their hopes in the idea that Chutkan could turn the hearings to determine which of Trump’s actions relating to Jan.
Seen from this perspective, granting Trump immunity was the only possible outcome in a small-C constitutional sense. Anything else would have destabilized the political order. Critics of the majority opinion, including the dissenters, scoffed at Roberts for worrying about the “prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself” as each new president prosecutes his predecessor. Yet had he greenlighted Smith’s election interference charges as filed, that’s just what would have happened.