Today’s Supreme Court decision on immunity doesn’t fill me with confidence. To look at social media today, there’s a lot of spewing on both sides about which side ‘won’.
No one ‘won’, but I think *we* lost.
This argument isn’t about Trump. This is about the Presidency. It doesn’t matter who that person is, but everyone you see or read is preoccupied with the short term. They’re also reading for the lowest of hanging fruit. Democrats are saying “Well, that means that Biden can (insert wet dream here)!” Over on the MAGA side they’re dragging out the ‘mug of liberal tears jokes’ again. Neither side is interested in looking beyond November of 2024 out of political convenience.
As an example, take a look at what happened when Harry Reid nuked the 60 vote cloture rule for all judicial nominations except for the Supreme Court in 2013. In the short term it gave the Senate Democrats the ability to confirm their nominations to the bench with a simple majority. Great news for the Democrat majority, until they lose that majority.
In 2017, Mitch McConnell—having regained the position of Majority Leader— stepped through the door that Harry Reid opened and nuked the 60 vote threshold for Supreme Court Justices. As a result, Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were confirmed relatively easily without a vote from the Democratic side. We all know the rest of that story.
The point is that what was politically expedient for one party in the Senate in the short term worked against them in the long term. Presidential immunity will be no different. There’s nothing to stop a President from taking any action they like as long as it can be justified as an official action. That means that they will find a way to argue that everything they do is an official action, and litigating that will take longer than these Trump cases. The President—any President—is now unburdened by the threat of prosecution, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
What will change is the group that thinks that it’s not a problem.