The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s audacious claim of presidential immunity from prosecution — with oral argument a leisurely seven weeks off — all but guarantees one of two terrible outcomes. Either the former president’s trial on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 election, a trial that was supposed to start next week, will now not take place until after the 2024 election, or it will be held in the final months before Election Day. The justices are not entirely responsible for this mess, but they have just made a bad situation far worse than it needed to be.
My beef isn’t with the court’s decision to hear the case — it’s with the outrageously lethargic timing. It would have been far better for the court to have taken up the issue back in December, when special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to leapfrog the federal appeals court. Now, two and a half months have gone by. It took the justices two weeks after Trump sought their intervention to announce that they would hear the case. Worse, they set oral argument for the week of April 22, a delay that means a decision could easily take until May or even linger until the term finishes at the end of June.
Worst of all, especially given this timetable, the justices could have allowed trial preparations to go forward while the case was briefed, argued and decided. That would have prevented Trump from accomplishing what has been his aim all along: to use the immunity claim as a ploy to delay his trial until after the election.
Instead, the court engaged in a weird procedural dodge. It didn’t do what Trump’s lawyers had asked and grant a stay of the appeals court ruling against him. Instead, it issued an unusual order to the appeals court that ends up having the same effect — without having to satisfy the stringent standards that are supposed to apply when a stay is sought.
In any event, the bottom line is that pretrial proceedings remain frozen. And because U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has estimated the parties need 88 days to get ready for trial, that means it will take months after the justices finally rule for a trial to begin. That means a trial isn’t likely to begin until September — at the earliest. And you can bet that Trump, if that happens, will be insisting that the trial be postponed so he can be free to campaign, not confined to sitting in the federal courthouse.
Ruth Marcus on the Supreme Court
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-opmarcuscourt_inline_collection_20
How to explain what’s going on here? This has all the hallmarks of a compromise that isn’t much of a compromise at all — no surprise given the conservative supermajority. Aside from any partisan motives, it’s not hard to imagine that some of the conservative justices, bristling at the notion that the electoral calendar should play a role, would want the case decided in the regular order. You don’t have to be a Trump backer to take that position. That would have meant, since the court’s calendar was already set for this year, kicking it over until the next term begins in October.
Same with the sluggish pace. This court knows full well how to speed things up when it wants to. Consider the timeline in Colorado’s Trump disqualification case: He asked the court to take the case on Jan. 3; it agreed two days later and set argument for Feb. 5. (In that situation, granted, an undeniable deadline was looming. So where’s the ruling? Colorado’s primary is Tuesday.) But here, too, I suspect that the conservative justices might have thought they were already expediting matters. Bottom line: You can’t drive a good bargain without more bargaining power than the liberal justices have.
Finally, some justices might be refusing to accept any responsibility for the collision of the electoral and legal calendars; after all, they could argue, if Attorney General Merrick Garland had moved faster to bring charges against Trump involving conduct that is now three years in the past, we wouldn’t be in this fix. Perhaps, but we are where we are. The proximate cause of the current predicament is the court itself.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-optrumpindict_inline_collection_20
And there might be more delay — we’ll find out, eventually — built into the way the court has framed the question it wants to decide: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
The appeals court panel that unanimously rejected Trump’s immunity claim did so on a broader basis. Unlike a different appellate panel that considered the issue of Trump’s immunity in the context of a lawsuit for damages from those injured on Jan. 6, 2021, it didn’t parse whether Trump’s acts were in his official capacity or instead in his role as a presidential candidate. If the justices decide that is the better approach, it could take the lower courts additional time to sort through which allegedly criminal conduct involved official acts.
From the start, this long-shot bid for presidential immunity has always been Trump’s play for time. With the Supreme Court’s complicity, it has worked like a charm.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/29/supreme-court-trump-immunity/
My beef isn’t with the court’s decision to hear the case — it’s with the outrageously lethargic timing. It would have been far better for the court to have taken up the issue back in December, when special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to leapfrog the federal appeals court. Now, two and a half months have gone by. It took the justices two weeks after Trump sought their intervention to announce that they would hear the case. Worse, they set oral argument for the week of April 22, a delay that means a decision could easily take until May or even linger until the term finishes at the end of June.
Worst of all, especially given this timetable, the justices could have allowed trial preparations to go forward while the case was briefed, argued and decided. That would have prevented Trump from accomplishing what has been his aim all along: to use the immunity claim as a ploy to delay his trial until after the election.
Instead, the court engaged in a weird procedural dodge. It didn’t do what Trump’s lawyers had asked and grant a stay of the appeals court ruling against him. Instead, it issued an unusual order to the appeals court that ends up having the same effect — without having to satisfy the stringent standards that are supposed to apply when a stay is sought.
In any event, the bottom line is that pretrial proceedings remain frozen. And because U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has estimated the parties need 88 days to get ready for trial, that means it will take months after the justices finally rule for a trial to begin. That means a trial isn’t likely to begin until September — at the earliest. And you can bet that Trump, if that happens, will be insisting that the trial be postponed so he can be free to campaign, not confined to sitting in the federal courthouse.
Ruth Marcus on the Supreme Court
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-opmarcuscourt_inline_collection_20
How to explain what’s going on here? This has all the hallmarks of a compromise that isn’t much of a compromise at all — no surprise given the conservative supermajority. Aside from any partisan motives, it’s not hard to imagine that some of the conservative justices, bristling at the notion that the electoral calendar should play a role, would want the case decided in the regular order. You don’t have to be a Trump backer to take that position. That would have meant, since the court’s calendar was already set for this year, kicking it over until the next term begins in October.
Same with the sluggish pace. This court knows full well how to speed things up when it wants to. Consider the timeline in Colorado’s Trump disqualification case: He asked the court to take the case on Jan. 3; it agreed two days later and set argument for Feb. 5. (In that situation, granted, an undeniable deadline was looming. So where’s the ruling? Colorado’s primary is Tuesday.) But here, too, I suspect that the conservative justices might have thought they were already expediting matters. Bottom line: You can’t drive a good bargain without more bargaining power than the liberal justices have.
Finally, some justices might be refusing to accept any responsibility for the collision of the electoral and legal calendars; after all, they could argue, if Attorney General Merrick Garland had moved faster to bring charges against Trump involving conduct that is now three years in the past, we wouldn’t be in this fix. Perhaps, but we are where we are. The proximate cause of the current predicament is the court itself.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-optrumpindict_inline_collection_20
And there might be more delay — we’ll find out, eventually — built into the way the court has framed the question it wants to decide: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
The appeals court panel that unanimously rejected Trump’s immunity claim did so on a broader basis. Unlike a different appellate panel that considered the issue of Trump’s immunity in the context of a lawsuit for damages from those injured on Jan. 6, 2021, it didn’t parse whether Trump’s acts were in his official capacity or instead in his role as a presidential candidate. If the justices decide that is the better approach, it could take the lower courts additional time to sort through which allegedly criminal conduct involved official acts.
From the start, this long-shot bid for presidential immunity has always been Trump’s play for time. With the Supreme Court’s complicity, it has worked like a charm.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/29/supreme-court-trump-immunity/
