Credit to Michael Barbaro of The New York Times for ever so gingerly happening upon the lesson Democrats should have taken from the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, but didn’t. Or more likely, refuse to.
On Tuesday’s edition of the Times’ “Daily” podcast, Barbaro and Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak mulled over the ruling, and at the very end of the episode, Barbaro had his epiphany. “Another way to think about this ruling if you step way back,” he said, “is that it’s kind of the Supreme Court saying that when you elect a president, you have to accept, dear American people, that the Constitution gives them a tremendous amount of power and legal latitude to kind of do what they want …”
Barbaro was cooking. You could feel it.
He continued his revelation. “And we, the Supreme Court, are going to make it pretty hard to hold that president criminally responsible for their actions,” he said, “so, voters need to think really carefully about who they want to possess this level of immunity.”
I imagine Barbaro swelled with pride at having successfully followed that pure and true train of thought to its logical end. He did it! He really did it!
I just wish the rest of his peers in the media and the Democrat Party would do the same.
Immediately after the ruling, holding that a president carrying out his constitutional responsibilities can’t be held criminally liable for it once out of office (duh), Democrats and leftist triflers scurried to the Internet where they obnoxiously claimed the court had just given American presidents the authority to murder babies and rape nuns.
Hmm … Not seeing anything in Article II about that. Maybe I’m missing something.
They mused that President Biden must now have the legal right to assassinate Donald Trump.
The court’s opinion was admittedly ambiguous to the extent that it placed much of the burden of determining what constitutes “official” conduct by the president on lower courts. But it was clear in asserting that communications and deliberations between a president and anyone serving in his administration is immune from prosecution. In short, anyone wanting to press charges against a former president for things he did while in office is going to have to prove with great certainty that it’s for a good reason and not because, say, they’re mad.
This was more or less implied and accepted for the last 230 years. Then 2016 happened and because Democrats refused to accept the results of an election, they decided it was time to see how far this country can bend before it snaps. You know, just like the true vanguards of decency and democracy that they are.
The court decided what it did expressly because there’s no other way to make this system work if we don’t elect people we trust to do the right thing to keep it going. To even flirt with the belief that it would be the right thing to criminally prosecute a former elected official — let alone a U.S. president — for challenging the results of an election, tells you a lot about who’s in power right now. And that their response to the ruling wasn’t, “Yeah, maybe we took it too far,” but, “So we can legally assassinate Trump, right?” says the rest.
They either don’t understand it, or they’re ready to end it.
I’m glad at least Michael Barbaro understands it.
