In today's SCOTUS hearing, Samuel Alito argued that immunity for former presidents is good, actually, because without it, ex-presidents might refuse to leave office peacefully if they lose reelection...
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 25, 2024
Make it make sense. https://t.co/HepJVcgN2Q
If I were to take Justice Alito as a good-faith interrogator adhering to the actual facts of the Trump presidency--the actual president this case is about, and not some future generic president we're just having a classroom thought-experiment about, are we supposed to play along and imagine a path where 1/6 does not happen because Trump can rest safe in his bed at Mar-a-Lago certain that no ill shall befall him, because he had immunity. So, he just gracefully turns over the keys to the established firm:
And maybe that even means he is just fine keeping those documents from the White House that he doubtless acquired during his presidency--several boxes of, in fact--and selling them, because we are just going to assume a president does official things officially, and not shady-ass criminal stuff because one has always been a shady-ass criminal?
On a day where Justice Brown-Jackson noted that immunity (or should we rather call it, impunity?) would turn the Oval Office into a center of criminal activity, we received testimony that Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders were in contact--via their White House offices, with David Pecker regarding the election interference/hush money cover-up scheme.
The Constitution was not delivered by divine hands but was worked out among the moneyed white men of the 18th century who founded our nation, and our political figures are not now nor ever have been selected from the ranks of angels but elected from the ranks of humans by other fallible humans and should be assumed to be imperfect.
Trump cries and complains that he has been singled out because he is a political candidate, and not because of what he has done. A criminal case is not based on identity, but the evidence of wrong-doing. We all know that a case should be settled by evaluation of facts in a court of law. But rest assured, he has also avowed that he will repay--with the same mouth that he once vowed to lock up his political foes in 2016. He dangles pardons before people who cover up his transgressions. He inveigles them with a legal slush fund to tell them they are protected if they protect him. He tells people he had the AG in his pocket as president--he was above the law in office and assumes the same thing now.
And he is now an unindicted co-conspirator in AZ, having 18 supporters now indicted there because they fucked with him.
The questioning in this case by particularly the male conservative justices on the case alarmed me, to the effect that they seem to not want to deal with the Trump they actually have, but the fine, upstanding conservative and not-crazy person they want. My question for them is--are you willing to neuter yourselves and all the importance of the Supreme Court as a potential check on executive power? Because rather than a blanket immunity (what Trump and his counsel appear to want) or trying to fuck about with a Gordian knot of just how much lawlessness you would grant to someone who is no respecter of the law, or people, or rights, or any Constitutional shit whatsoever--
They leave things as is. And let any case vis Trump beyond this one just go to whatever appeal, and if you have to be the final arbiter, do it on a case by case, or reject it as such because for Christ's sake, you represent a whole ass branch of government and are supposed to do stuff like that. Your lifetime appointment is so you don't have to be political minions. What the whole entire fuck! Are the vacations THAT FUCKING NICE????!!!
Would 2025 Trump grant that 2021-2024 Biden had immunity? We have one president at a time, allegedly--so who gets immunity dibs the day Trump decides to light Biden's ass up?
I don't know. I've been writing these TWGB things for a long time, understanding perfectly well that there are low-information voters who don't follow all the damn moves that occur in TrumpWorld. I do not expect DC denizens like I assume SCOTUS justices to be to play ignorant of what TrumpWorld is, or what it means for democracy if political lawlessness become a norm.
For scaring the heck out of me, I sentence them to watch Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. Because what you allow the law to do reflects on you. We are not living in a world of hypotheticals, but real events. Real people and their lives hang in the balance.
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