The Supreme Court Decides Trump Has Immunity for “Official Actions”

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump is entitled to immunity from prosecution on charges regarding attempts to overturn the 2020 election, a ruling that expanded presidential power. The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal justices dissenting.

The vote further complicates the case against Trump, which means a jury trial before the November Presidential elections is now unlikely. While the charges against Trump have been narrowed, he would not be immune from acts deemed by the courts to be unofficial.

The ruling states that while the president does enjoy absolute immunity regarding official acts made authoritative by the Constitution, there is only presumptive immunity for all acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility. This means all acts performed by the president not explicitly protected by the Constitution, although enjoying partial immunity, can be analyzed by the court and determined to be official or unofficial. If the actions are deemed unofficial, there would be no shielding from prosecution available for the president. 

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said,“The president therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” he wrote. “That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy or party.”

Several politicians and commentators on the right praised the Supreme Court’s decision, as they believe President Joe Biden has expanded the powers of the federal bureaucracy himself and wrongfully persecuted Trump for doing the same thing. The left tended to criticize Roberts’ majority opinion, which they claim insulates Trump from prosecution for potentially treasonous actions, including his alleged incitement of the January 6th Capitol riot.

In the Daily Beast Opinion (Left bias), Michael Daly wrote, “the president is largely immune from prosecution—a new power that may include absolving Donald Trump’s incitement of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” Daly said, “the person most to blame for the riot was Trump himself.”

A writer for Fox News Opinion (Right bias) argued that “No matter how much one may dislike Trump, there is no ‘Get Trump’ exception to the law or the Constitution, and rule of law means that prosecutors may not first target the man and then conjure up the crime…The Biden administration was wrong to break norms and prosecute a former president, if only because doing so impinged on the ‘exclusive and preclusive’ powers of future presidents.” The writer added that “Thankfully, Monday’s well-reasoned Supreme Court decision prevented” a vicious cycle of prosecutions, “and properly considered all the different competing factors, including a president’s constitutional responsibilities and ability to do his job.”

An opinion contributor for Bloomberg (Lean left bias) said the result of the Supreme Court’s decision “will mean that most, maybe all the federal criminal charges against Trump for conduct related to Jan. 6 will get dismissed.” They said Trump’s immunity reflects “The single greatest transformation in the American constitutional system since 1789,” which is the rise of “the imperial presidency,” where the modern president practically acts as “an elected ruler of a global empire…The Trump immunity decision extends that protection to criminal immunity—all in exercise of the same core idea that the all-powerful president needs to be free and undistracted to run the empire.” The contributor concluded that “The constitutional takeaway is that the court’s six conservatives, all of them supposedly originalists who care about the text of the Constitution, deviated from their jurisprudential principles to create criminal immunity for Trump.”

A piece by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (Lean right bias) stated that merely focusing on the case’s implications for Trump “ignores the long-run implications for the American republic,” where a president needs “absolute immunity from civil suits for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his duties” in order to effectively run the country. The board concluded that “The court properly reads the Constitution to offer absolute immunity for actions within the core plenary powers of the executive.”