Washington, D.C. Trump Federal 2020 Election Subversion Indictment
United States v. Trump
Filed:
August 1, 2023
Indictment of former President Donald Trump by a federal grand jury
in Washington, D.C. Trump was indicted on four counts relating to his
efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“[F]or more than two months following election day on November 3,
2020, the Defendant [Donald Trump] spread lies that there had been
outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually
won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were
false,” the indictment reads.
According to the unsealed indictment, Trump is charged with:
Conspiracy to defraud the United States;
Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding;
Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and
Conspiracy against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.
On Aug. 3, 2023, Trump pleaded not guilty as his arraignment in
Washington, D.C. On Oct. 17, the court entered a gag order prohibiting
Trump from making public statements about U.S. Department of Justice
attorneys, the court’s staff and witnesses. Trump appealed the order to
the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which largely
upheld the order on Dec. 8.
On Dec. 1, the district court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the
indictment based on presidential immunity grounds. On Dec. 7, Trump
appealed this ruling to the D.C. Circuit.
On Dec. 11, 2023, the government filed a petition for writ of
certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to rule on whether Trump
is immune from criminal charges for actions he took while serving as
president.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 13, the district court granted Trump’s request to
stay proceedings while his presidential immunity appeal plays out.
On Dec. 22, the Supreme Court denied the government’s petition for a
writ of certiorari. Litigation is ongoing in the D.C. Circuit regarding
Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution.
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the wife of senator running man is arguing against the use mifepristone at scotus this morning.....
do better missouri.
we are trying to get him the fuck out. keep an eye on lucas kunce.
I don't know who that is but he's better than Hawley.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
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Supreme Court seems skeptical of Trump's claim of absolute immunity but decision's timing is unclear
By MARK SHERMAN
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday appeared likely to reject former President Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution over election interference, but several justices signaled reservations about the charges that could cause a lengthy delay, possibly beyond November’s election.
A majority of the justices did not appear to embrace the claim of absolute immunity that would stop special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump on charges he conspired to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. But in arguments lasting more than 2 1/2 hours in the court’s first consideration of criminal charges against a former president, several conservative justices indicated they could limit when former presidents might be prosecuted, suggesting that the case might have to be sent back to lower courts before any trial could begin.
Justice Samuel Alito said that “whatever we decide is going to apply to all future presidents.”
The timing of the Supreme Court’s decision could be as important as the outcome. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the election, and the later the justices issue their decision, the more likely he is to succeed. If Trump regains the presidency, he could order the Justice Department to dismiss the case, or possibly, as two justices suggested, pardon himself if convicted.
Since conservatives on the court gained a supermajority with the confirmation of three Trump appointees, they have cast aside decades-old long precedent on abortion and affirmation action. Now Trump is asking them to rule that one of the fundamental tenets of the American system of government — that no person is above the law -- should be rejected as well, at least as it applies to him.
The active questioning of all nine justices left the strong impression that the court was not headed for the sort of speedy, consensus decision that would allow a trial to begin quickly.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two of Trump’s three high court appointees, and Alito said their concern was not the case against Trump, but rather the effect of their ruling on future presidencies.
Each time Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben sought to focus on Trump’s actions, these justices jumped in. “This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” Kavanaugh said. The court is writing a decision “for the ages,” Gorsuch said.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the other Trump appointee, seemed less open to arguments advanced by Trump lawyer D. John Sauer, searching for a way a trial could take place.
Smith’s team is asking for a speedy resolution. The court typically issues its last opinions by the end of June, about four months before the election. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who would preside over the trial, said pre-trial issues could take up to three months.
The court has moved very quickly in prior cases involving presidential power, deciding the Watergate tapes case against President Richard Nixon just 16 days after arguments. Earlier this year, it took the justices less than a month to rule unanimously that states couldn't kick Trump off the ballot.
Trump, the first former president charged with crimes, had said he wanted to be at the Supreme Court on Thursday. Instead, he was in a courtroom in New York, where he is standing trial on charges that he falsified business records to keep damaging information from voters when he directed hush money payments to a former porn star to keep quiet her claims that they had a sexual encounter.
Sauer argued that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, he said, 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.
Several justices drilled down on trying to come up with a definition of what constituted an official act, and whether charges based on one should be thrown out.
Justice Elena Kagan at one pointed wondered whether a former president could escape prosecution even if he ordered a coup or sold nuclear secrets. Sauer said prosecutions might not be allowed it those were determined to be official acts.
“That sure sounds bad, doesn't it?” Kagan asked.
Chief Justice John Roberts conjured up a president being indicted for receiving a bribe in exchange for an ambassadorial appointment. How could the indictment go forward if prosecutors had to remove the official act, the appointment. “That's like a one-legged stool, right?” Roberts asked.
The election interference conspiracy case brought by Smith in Washington is just one of four criminal cases confronting Trump. Smith was in the courtroom Thursday, seated at the table for lawyers taking part in the case.
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. Dreeben said that even if some of the acts are considered part of the president's powers, like talking to Justice Department officials, they still should be kept in the indictment.
Trump's conversations with then-Vice President Mike Pence, urging him to reject some electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, might also fall under official acts.
Barrett asked Dreeben whether Smith's team could “just proceed based on the private conduct and drop the official conduct.” Dreeben said that might be possible, especially if prosecutors could, for example, use the conversations with Justice Department officials and Pence to make their case.
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.
Commentators had speculated about why the court took 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,” Roosevelt said. “Even Richard Nixon said that the American people deserve to know whether their president is a crook. The Supreme Court seems to disagree.”
The court has several options for deciding the case, though something between a complete win for Trump or prosecutors seemed most likely.
The court might spell out when former presidents are shielded from prosecution. It could then either declare that Trump's alleged conduct easily crossed the line or return the case to Chutkan so she can decide whether Trump should have to stand trial.
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No shit it would have implications with future presidents. Are these idiots for real? It’s called the law and it’s supposed to have future implications.
No shit it would have implications with future presidents. Are these idiots for real? It’s called the law and it’s supposed to have future implications.
the problem with it is really, they took up a question that wasn't being appealed or asked. which suggests to me, on its face ,chutkin and the appelate panel are on point.
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Stick a fork in her, ‘Murica is done. Would someone please turn out the lights on the way out? In my fucking lifetime. From Letter From An American:
Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in that effort, did not recuse himself from today’s hearing, and the court did not object to his presence.
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post noted that the justices on the court seemed to be weighing “which poses the greater risk—putting a criminal president above the law or hamstringing noncriminal presidents with the risk of frivolous or vindictive prosecutions brought by their successors.”
The liberals on the court focused on the former—after all, the case is about whether Trump should answer to criminal indictments for trying to overturn our democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted: “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”
In contrast, the right-wing justices focused on the risk of vindictive prosecutions, which has been the heart of Trump’s argument for complete immunity. Trump insists that without immunity, a president will be afraid to make controversial decisions out of fear of later prosecution. Such a lack of immunity would destroy the presidency, he has argued, claiming that he is simply trying to protect the office.
And yet he is the first of 45 presidents to be charged with a crime, and no previous president made any claim of immunity.
Nonetheless, the right-wing justices made it clear they were more interested in the future than in the present. In their comments they stayed far away from Trump and focused instead on presidents in the past and the future. (Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.”)
Justice Neil Gorsuch said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” Justice Samuel Alito tried to turn the argument for accountability upside down by suggesting that complete immunity would be more likely to encourage presidents to leave office, because if a president knew they could be prosecuted for crimes, they would be less likely to leave peacefully.
Indeed, Marcus wrote: “The conservative justices’ professed concerns over the implications of their rulings for imaginary future presidents, in imaginary future proceedings, seemed more important to them than bringing Trump to justice.” Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis was more concrete in his reaction; he found it “[u]nbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”
The court’s decision will likely take weeks and thus will delay Trump’s trial for crimes committed in his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, likely until after the 2024 election. On Monday, April 22, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, called out Trump’s attacks on the legal system and delays to avoid accountability. In a New York Times op-ed, Cheney reminded the justices that delay would mean that the American people would not get to hear the testimony and evidence Special Counsel Jack Smith has uncovered before the 2024 election.
“It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later,” she wrote.
And yet, here we are.
Voters’ right to know what a candidate for president did to overthrow the will of the people in a previous election is at stake in today’s arguments. But so is the rule of law on which our democracy stands. The rule of law means that laws are made according to established procedures rather than a leader’s dictates, and that they are reasonable. Laws are enforced equally. No one is above the law, and everyone has an obligation to obey the law.
As Justice Elena Kagan noted today: “The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”
Indeed.
“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
I can’t believe that these arguments about vindictive prosecution are even entering the discussion. We’re in Bizzaro World.
its always been a possibility. rhere are appelate mechanisms in place to safeguard that shit.
the fact 1 justice said "I'm not concerned with this case......" is fucked on any number of levels. you try the case in front of you. namely fucksticks false claims of official acts/immunity. every decision sets the standard going forward. except for roe......
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I can’t believe that these arguments about vindictive prosecution are even entering the discussion. We’re in Bizzaro World.
its always been a possibility. rhere are appelate mechanisms in place to safeguard that shit.
the fact 1 justice said "I'm not concerned with this case......" is fucked on any number of levels. you try the case in front of you. namely fucksticks false claims of official acts/immunity. every decision sets the standard going forward. except for roe......
This concern about future political outcomes and factoring that into their judgment is really grinding my gears.
The conservative legal movement in
the United States is more powerful than ever. One largely unknown man
has played a significant role in pushing the American judiciary to the
right: Leonard Leo.
by Andrea Bernstein, Andy Kroll and Ilya Marritz Co-published with
On the Media
Oct. 13, 2023, 5 a.m. EDT
Series:
Friends of the Court:
SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This podcast was produced with On the Media.
This is “We Don’t Talk
About Leonard,” a podcast series with WNYC’s “On The Media” that
explores the web of money, influence and power behind the conservative
takeover of America’s courts — and the man at the center of it all:
Leonard Leo.
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Supreme Court sides with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, spurning a conservative attack
By MARK SHERMAN
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a conservative-led attack that could have undermined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The justices ruled 7-2 that the way the CFPB is funded does not violate the Constitution, reversing a lower court and drawing praises from consumers. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, splitting with his frequent allies, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented.
The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate mortgages, car loans and other consumer finance. The case was brought by payday lenders who object to a bureau rule that limits their ability to withdraw funds directly from borrowers' bank accounts. It's among several major challenges to federal regulatory agencies on the docket this term for a court that has for more than a decade been open to limits on their operations.
The CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has long been opposed by Republicans and their financial backers. The bureau says it has returned $19 billion to consumers since its creation.
Outside the Supreme Court following the decision, Warren said, “The Supreme Court followed the law, and the CFPB is here to stay.”
President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat who has taken steps to strengthen the bureau, called the ruling “an unmistakable win for American consumers.”
Unlike most federal agencies, the consumer bureau does not rely on the annual budget process in Congress. Instead, it is funded directly by the Federal Reserve, with a current annual limit of around $600 million.
The federal appeals court in New Orleans, in a novel ruling, held that the funding violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause because it improperly shields the CFPB from congressional supervision.
Thomas reached back to the earliest days of the Constitution in his majority opinion to note that “the Bureau's funding mechanism fits comfortably with the First Congress' appropriations practice.”
In dissent, Alito wrote, “The Court upholds a novel statutory scheme under which the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) may bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight.”
The CFPB case was argued more than seven months ago, during the first week of the court’s term. Lopsided decisions like Thursday's 7-2 vote typically don't take so long, but Alito's dissent was longer than the majority opinion, and two other justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separate opinions even though they both were part of the majority.
Consumer groups cheered the decision, as did a bureau spokesman.
“For years, lawbreaking companies and Wall Street lobbyists have been scheming to defund essential consumer protection enforcement," bureau spokesman Sam Gilford said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has rejected their radical theory that would have devastated the American financial markets. The Court repudiated the arguments of the payday loan lobby and made it clear that the CFPB is here to stay.”
Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said the decision upholding the consumer bureau's funding structure would have positive effects across the U.S. economy.
“It’s always nice to see the courts get something right — especially in this tawdry circumstance where payday loan predators sought to wriggle out of basic oversight using absurd distortions of law and fact,” Van Tol said in a statement.
While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some other business interests backed the payday lenders, mortgage bankers and other sectors regulated by the CFPB cautioned the court to avoid a broad ruling that could unsettle the markets.
In 2020, the court decided another CFPB case, ruling that Congress had improperly insulated the head of the bureau from removal. The justices said the director could be replaced by the president at will but allowed the bureau to continue to operate.
___
This story has been corrected to show the bureau spokesman’s surname is Gilford, not Goldford or Gifford.
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Supreme Court finds no bias against Black voters in a South Carolina congressional district
By MARK SHERMAN
1 hour ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court 's conservative majority on Thursday preserved a Republican-held South Carolina congressional district, rejecting a lower-court ruling that said the district discriminated against Black voters.
In dissent, liberal justices warned that the court was insulating states from claims of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
In a 6-3 decision, the court held that South Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature did nothing wrong during redistricting when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace's hold on the coastal district by moving 30,000 Democratic-leaning Black residents of Charleston out of the district.
“I'm very disturbed about the outcome. It’s as if we don’t matter. But we do matter and our voices deserve to be heard,” said Taiwan Scott, a Black voter who sued over the redistricting.
President Joe Biden, whose administration backed Scott and the other plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, also criticized the ruling. “The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement.
But Mace, reacting to the decision, said, “It reaffirms everything everyone in South Carolina already knows, which is that the line wasn’t based on race.”
The case presented the court with the tricky issue of how to distinguish race from politics. The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Moving voters based on their politics is OK, the Supreme Court has held.
A lower court had ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after it found that the state used race as a proxy for partisan affiliation in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Thursday's decision won’t have a direct effect on the 2024 election. The lower court had previously ordered the state to use the challenged map in the November vote, which could help Republicans as they try to hold on to their narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, criticized lower-court judges for their “misguided approach” that refused to presume that lawmakers acted in good faith and gave too much credit to the challengers.
Alito wrote that one weakness of the Black voters' case was that they did not produce an alternative map, which he called an “implicit concession” that they couldn't have drawn one. “The District Court's conclusions are clearly erroneous because it did not follow this basic logic,” he wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three liberals, said her conservative colleagues ignored the work of the lower court that found the district had been gerrymandered by race.
“Perhaps most dispiriting,” Kagan wrote, the court adopted “special rules to specially disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting.”
Richard Hasen, an election expert at the University of California at Los Angeles law school, agreed with Kagan, writing in a blog post that the decision “makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power.”
Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement, “The highest court in our land greenlit racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting process, denied Black voters the right to be free from the race-based sorting and sent a message that facts, process, and precedent will not protect the Black vote.”
However, Sen. Thomas Alexander, the president of the South Carolina Senate, praised the ruling. “As I have said throughout this process, our plan was meticulously crafted to comply with statutory and constitutional requirements, and I was completely confident we would prevail,” Alexander said.
The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymandering cases could be not be brought in federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was part of the conservative majority five years ago, wrote separately Thursday to say federal courts should similarly get out of the business of refereeing racial gerrymandering disputes.
“It is well past time for the Court to return these political issues where they belong—the political branches,” Thomas wrote. No other justice signed on.
When Mace first won election in 2020, she edged Democratic incumbent Rep. Joe Cunningham by 1%, under 5,400 votes. In 2022, following redistricting driven by the 2020 census results, Mace won reelection by 14%. She is among eight Republicans who voted in October to oust Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as House speaker.
The case differed from one in Alabama in which the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers diluted Black voters' political power under the landmark Voting Rights Act by drawing just one district with a majority Black population. The court's decision led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana with a second district where Democratic-leaning Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate.
In South Carolina, Black voters wouldn’t have been as numerous in a redrawn district. But combined with a substantial set of Democratic-leaning white voters, Democrats might have been competitive in the reconfigured district.
The high court left open one part of the case about whether the map intentionally sought to dilute the votes of Black residents.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with more than a dozen other Senate Democrats, introduced a bill on
Wednesday requiring U.S. Supreme Court justices to provide written
explanations and record votes for decisions in their emergency docket,
also known as the shadow docket.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with more than a dozen other Senate Democrats, introduced a bill on
Wednesday requiring U.S. Supreme Court justices to provide written
explanations and record votes for decisions in their emergency docket,
also known as the shadow docket.
continues...
the written explanation is "money, and right wing political expediency".
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Comments
Washington, D.C. Trump Federal 2020 Election Subversion Indictment
United States v. Trump
Filed: August 1, 2023
Indictment of former President Donald Trump by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. Trump was indicted on four counts relating to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“[F]or more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant [Donald Trump] spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment reads.
According to the unsealed indictment, Trump is charged with:
On Aug. 3, 2023, Trump pleaded not guilty as his arraignment in Washington, D.C. On Oct. 17, the court entered a gag order prohibiting Trump from making public statements about U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, the court’s staff and witnesses. Trump appealed the order to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which largely upheld the order on Dec. 8.
On Dec. 1, the district court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the indictment based on presidential immunity grounds. On Dec. 7, Trump appealed this ruling to the D.C. Circuit.
On Dec. 11, 2023, the government filed a petition for writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to rule on whether Trump is immune from criminal charges for actions he took while serving as president.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 13, the district court granted Trump’s request to stay proceedings while his presidential immunity appeal plays out.
On Dec. 22, the Supreme Court denied the government’s petition for a writ of certiorari. Litigation is ongoing in the D.C. Circuit regarding Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution.
continues.....
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"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
next we have to get schmitt out of there.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday appeared likely to reject former President Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution over election interference, but several justices signaled reservations about the charges that could cause a lengthy delay, possibly beyond November’s election.
A majority of the justices did not appear to embrace the claim of absolute immunity that would stop special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump on charges he conspired to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. But in arguments lasting more than 2 1/2 hours in the court’s first consideration of criminal charges against a former president, several conservative justices indicated they could limit when former presidents might be prosecuted, suggesting that the case might have to be sent back to lower courts before any trial could begin.
Justice Samuel Alito said that “whatever we decide is going to apply to all future presidents.”
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The timing of the Supreme Court’s decision could be as important as the outcome. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the election, and the later the justices issue their decision, the more likely he is to succeed. If Trump regains the presidency, he could order the Justice Department to dismiss the case, or possibly, as two justices suggested, pardon himself if convicted.
Since conservatives on the court gained a supermajority with the confirmation of three Trump appointees, they have cast aside decades-old long precedent on abortion and affirmation action. Now Trump is asking them to rule that one of the fundamental tenets of the American system of government — that no person is above the law -- should be rejected as well, at least as it applies to him.
The active questioning of all nine justices left the strong impression that the court was not headed for the sort of speedy, consensus decision that would allow a trial to begin quickly.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two of Trump’s three high court appointees, and Alito said their concern was not the case against Trump, but rather the effect of their ruling on future presidencies.
Each time Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben sought to focus on Trump’s actions, these justices jumped in. “This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” Kavanaugh said. The court is writing a decision “for the ages,” Gorsuch said.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the other Trump appointee, seemed less open to arguments advanced by Trump lawyer D. John Sauer, searching for a way a trial could take place.
Smith’s team is asking for a speedy resolution. The court typically issues its last opinions by the end of June, about four months before the election. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who would preside over the trial, said pre-trial issues could take up to three months.
The court has moved very quickly in prior cases involving presidential power, deciding the Watergate tapes case against President Richard Nixon just 16 days after arguments. Earlier this year, it took the justices less than a month to rule unanimously that states couldn't kick Trump off the ballot.
Trump, the first former president charged with crimes, had said he wanted to be at the Supreme Court on Thursday. Instead, he was in a courtroom in New York, where he is standing trial on charges that he falsified business records to keep damaging information from voters when he directed hush money payments to a former porn star to keep quiet her claims that they had a sexual encounter.
Sauer argued that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, he said, 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.
Several justices drilled down on trying to come up with a definition of what constituted an official act, and whether charges based on one should be thrown out.
Justice Elena Kagan at one pointed wondered whether a former president could escape prosecution even if he ordered a coup or sold nuclear secrets. Sauer said prosecutions might not be allowed it those were determined to be official acts.
“That sure sounds bad, doesn't it?” Kagan asked.
Chief Justice John Roberts conjured up a president being indicted for receiving a bribe in exchange for an ambassadorial appointment. How could the indictment go forward if prosecutors had to remove the official act, the appointment. “That's like a one-legged stool, right?” Roberts asked.
The election interference conspiracy case brought by Smith in Washington is just one of four criminal cases confronting Trump. Smith was in the courtroom Thursday, seated at the table for lawyers taking part in the case.
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. Dreeben said that even if some of the acts are considered part of the president's powers, like talking to Justice Department officials, they still should be kept in the indictment.
Trump's conversations with then-Vice President Mike Pence, urging him to reject some electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, might also fall under official acts.
Barrett asked Dreeben whether Smith's team could “just proceed based on the private conduct and drop the official conduct.” Dreeben said that might be possible, especially if prosecutors could, for example, use the conversations with Justice Department officials and Pence to make their case.
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.
Commentators had speculated about why the court took 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,” Roosevelt said. “Even Richard Nixon said that the American people deserve to know whether their president is a crook. The Supreme Court seems to disagree.”
The court has several options for deciding the case, though something between a complete win for Trump or prosecutors seemed most likely.
The court might spell out when former presidents are shielded from prosecution. It could then either declare that Trump's alleged conduct easily crossed the line or return the case to Chutkan so she can decide whether Trump should have to stand trial.
___
Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
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the problem with it is really, they took up a question that wasn't being appealed or asked. which suggests to me, on its face ,chutkin and the appelate panel are on point.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in that effort, did not recuse himself from today’s hearing, and the court did not object to his presence.
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post noted that the justices on the court seemed to be weighing “which poses the greater risk—putting a criminal president above the law or hamstringing noncriminal presidents with the risk of frivolous or vindictive prosecutions brought by their successors.”
The liberals on the court focused on the former—after all, the case is about whether Trump should answer to criminal indictments for trying to overturn our democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted: “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”
In contrast, the right-wing justices focused on the risk of vindictive prosecutions, which has been the heart of Trump’s argument for complete immunity. Trump insists that without immunity, a president will be afraid to make controversial decisions out of fear of later prosecution. Such a lack of immunity would destroy the presidency, he has argued, claiming that he is simply trying to protect the office.
And yet he is the first of 45 presidents to be charged with a crime, and no previous president made any claim of immunity.
Nonetheless, the right-wing justices made it clear they were more interested in the future than in the present. In their comments they stayed far away from Trump and focused instead on presidents in the past and the future. (Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.”)
Justice Neil Gorsuch said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” Justice Samuel Alito tried to turn the argument for accountability upside down by suggesting that complete immunity would be more likely to encourage presidents to leave office, because if a president knew they could be prosecuted for crimes, they would be less likely to leave peacefully.
Indeed, Marcus wrote: “The conservative justices’ professed concerns over the implications of their rulings for imaginary future presidents, in imaginary future proceedings, seemed more important to them than bringing Trump to justice.” Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis was more concrete in his reaction; he found it “[u]nbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”
The court’s decision will likely take weeks and thus will delay Trump’s trial for crimes committed in his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, likely until after the 2024 election. On Monday, April 22, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, called out Trump’s attacks on the legal system and delays to avoid accountability. In a New York Times op-ed, Cheney reminded the justices that delay would mean that the American people would not get to hear the testimony and evidence Special Counsel Jack Smith has uncovered before the 2024 election.
“It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later,” she wrote.
And yet, here we are.
Voters’ right to know what a candidate for president did to overthrow the will of the people in a previous election is at stake in today’s arguments. But so is the rule of law on which our democracy stands. The rule of law means that laws are made according to established procedures rather than a leader’s dictates, and that they are reasonable. Laws are enforced equally. No one is above the law, and everyone has an obligation to obey the law.
As Justice Elena Kagan noted today: “The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”
Indeed.
“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
We Don’t Talk About Leonard
The conservative legal movement in the United States is more powerful than ever. One largely unknown man has played a significant role in pushing the American judiciary to the right: Leonard Leo.
Series: Friends of the Court: SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This podcast was produced with On the Media.
This is “We Don’t Talk About Leonard,” a podcast series with WNYC’s “On The Media” that explores the web of money, influence and power behind the conservative takeover of America’s courts — and the man at the center of it all: Leonard Leo.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a conservative-led attack that could have undermined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The justices ruled 7-2 that the way the CFPB is funded does not violate the Constitution, reversing a lower court and drawing praises from consumers. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, splitting with his frequent allies, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented.
The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate mortgages, car loans and other consumer finance. The case was brought by payday lenders who object to a bureau rule that limits their ability to withdraw funds directly from borrowers' bank accounts. It's among several major challenges to federal regulatory agencies on the docket this term for a court that has for more than a decade been open to limits on their operations.
The CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has long been opposed by Republicans and their financial backers. The bureau says it has returned $19 billion to consumers since its creation.
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Outside the Supreme Court following the decision, Warren said, “The Supreme Court followed the law, and the CFPB is here to stay.”
President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat who has taken steps to strengthen the bureau, called the ruling “an unmistakable win for American consumers.”
Unlike most federal agencies, the consumer bureau does not rely on the annual budget process in Congress. Instead, it is funded directly by the Federal Reserve, with a current annual limit of around $600 million.
The federal appeals court in New Orleans, in a novel ruling, held that the funding violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause because it improperly shields the CFPB from congressional supervision.
Thomas reached back to the earliest days of the Constitution in his majority opinion to note that “the Bureau's funding mechanism fits comfortably with the First Congress' appropriations practice.”
In dissent, Alito wrote, “The Court upholds a novel statutory scheme under which the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) may bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight.”
The CFPB case was argued more than seven months ago, during the first week of the court’s term. Lopsided decisions like Thursday's 7-2 vote typically don't take so long, but Alito's dissent was longer than the majority opinion, and two other justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separate opinions even though they both were part of the majority.
Consumer groups cheered the decision, as did a bureau spokesman.
“For years, lawbreaking companies and Wall Street lobbyists have been scheming to defund essential consumer protection enforcement," bureau spokesman Sam Gilford said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has rejected their radical theory that would have devastated the American financial markets. The Court repudiated the arguments of the payday loan lobby and made it clear that the CFPB is here to stay.”
Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said the decision upholding the consumer bureau's funding structure would have positive effects across the U.S. economy.
“It’s always nice to see the courts get something right — especially in this tawdry circumstance where payday loan predators sought to wriggle out of basic oversight using absurd distortions of law and fact,” Van Tol said in a statement.
While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some other business interests backed the payday lenders, mortgage bankers and other sectors regulated by the CFPB cautioned the court to avoid a broad ruling that could unsettle the markets.
In 2020, the court decided another CFPB case, ruling that Congress had improperly insulated the head of the bureau from removal. The justices said the director could be replaced by the president at will but allowed the bureau to continue to operate.
___
This story has been corrected to show the bureau spokesman’s surname is Gilford, not Goldford or Gifford.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
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this is 2 justices with spouses actively protesting a fair election.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court 's conservative majority on Thursday preserved a Republican-held South Carolina congressional district, rejecting a lower-court ruling that said the district discriminated against Black voters.
In dissent, liberal justices warned that the court was insulating states from claims of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
In a 6-3 decision, the court held that South Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature did nothing wrong during redistricting when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace's hold on the coastal district by moving 30,000 Democratic-leaning Black residents of Charleston out of the district.
“I'm very disturbed about the outcome. It’s as if we don’t matter. But we do matter and our voices deserve to be heard,” said Taiwan Scott, a Black voter who sued over the redistricting.
President Joe Biden, whose administration backed Scott and the other plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, also criticized the ruling. “The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement.
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But Mace, reacting to the decision, said, “It reaffirms everything everyone in South Carolina already knows, which is that the line wasn’t based on race.”
The case presented the court with the tricky issue of how to distinguish race from politics. The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Moving voters based on their politics is OK, the Supreme Court has held.
A lower court had ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after it found that the state used race as a proxy for partisan affiliation in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Thursday's decision won’t have a direct effect on the 2024 election. The lower court had previously ordered the state to use the challenged map in the November vote, which could help Republicans as they try to hold on to their narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, criticized lower-court judges for their “misguided approach” that refused to presume that lawmakers acted in good faith and gave too much credit to the challengers.
Alito wrote that one weakness of the Black voters' case was that they did not produce an alternative map, which he called an “implicit concession” that they couldn't have drawn one. “The District Court's conclusions are clearly erroneous because it did not follow this basic logic,” he wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three liberals, said her conservative colleagues ignored the work of the lower court that found the district had been gerrymandered by race.
“Perhaps most dispiriting,” Kagan wrote, the court adopted “special rules to specially disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting.”
Richard Hasen, an election expert at the University of California at Los Angeles law school, agreed with Kagan, writing in a blog post that the decision “makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power.”
Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement, “The highest court in our land greenlit racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting process, denied Black voters the right to be free from the race-based sorting and sent a message that facts, process, and precedent will not protect the Black vote.”
However, Sen. Thomas Alexander, the president of the South Carolina Senate, praised the ruling. “As I have said throughout this process, our plan was meticulously crafted to comply with statutory and constitutional requirements, and I was completely confident we would prevail,” Alexander said.
The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymandering cases could be not be brought in federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was part of the conservative majority five years ago, wrote separately Thursday to say federal courts should similarly get out of the business of refereeing racial gerrymandering disputes.
“It is well past time for the Court to return these political issues where they belong—the political branches,” Thomas wrote. No other justice signed on.
When Mace first won election in 2020, she edged Democratic incumbent Rep. Joe Cunningham by 1%, under 5,400 votes. In 2022, following redistricting driven by the 2020 census results, Mace won reelection by 14%. She is among eight Republicans who voted in October to oust Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as House speaker.
The case differed from one in Alabama in which the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers diluted Black voters' political power under the landmark Voting Rights Act by drawing just one district with a majority Black population. The court's decision led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana with a second district where Democratic-leaning Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate.
In South Carolina, Black voters wouldn’t have been as numerous in a redrawn district. But combined with a substantial set of Democratic-leaning white voters, Democrats might have been competitive in the reconfigured district.
The high court left open one part of the case about whether the map intentionally sought to dilute the votes of Black residents.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
___
Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
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Senate Democrats Introduce Bill To Make US Supreme Court More Transparent
By Courtney Cohn
May 23, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with more than a dozen other Senate Democrats, introduced a bill on Wednesday requiring U.S. Supreme Court justices to provide written explanations and record votes for decisions in their emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket.
continues...
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"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."