For SCOTUS Conservatives, Presidents Stand Above the Law

The justice was especially concerned with the idea that former presidents would be targeted for political prosecution by their rivals. When the government's lawyer, Michael Dreeben, argued that prosecutors don't always get grand juries to agree to indictments, Alito responded, "Every once in a while there's an eclipse too."

The risk of such prosecutions poses the biggest threat, Alito suggested: "If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?"

As Dreeben correctly responded, that is the literal inversion of the Jan. 6 case, which involves a defeated former president who, after pursuing several legal avenues to challenge the outcome and losing all of them, chose very clearly not to "go off into a peaceful retirement," but rather tried to overturn the election by illegal and unconstitutional means that resulted in a violent attack on Congress.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was also perplexed by Alito's upside-down hypothetical, which actively avoided the facts of the case before the court. "A stable democratic society needs the good faith of its public officials, correct?" she asked, adding that the crimes Trump is charged with committing "are the antithesis of democracy" and that his immunity argument cast doubt on the principle "that no man is above the law, either in his official or private acts."

Today confirms that the conservative justices sitting on the Supreme Court are more than comfortable with the crimes Donald Trump committed while in office in order to illegally stay in office. Remember when these same justices bellowed from high that it was not their job to legislate from the bench or to guess at intent, their job was to deal with the facts of the cases brought before them as dictated by the laws enumerated within the Constitution? Well, that appears to have gone by the boards if Alito's juxtaposition of reality serves as the basis to find a presidential immunity no one ever quantified or even imagined until Trump came along and undertook activities no other US President ever did.

The question the SCOTUS was engaged to answer today was whether a President has "absolute immunity" for any and all acts undertaken while in office. Now that has morphed into the non-asked argument as to whether criminal laws need to specifically include the President as prosecutable if charged with violations of them.

It is clear as day that the right wing is actively delegitimizing historical constitutional checks and balances, heretofore thought to apply to every single American equally without fault or favor in support of the most corrupt, anti-liberal (small L), criminal President to ever sully the White House and Oval Office. Trump is everything our Founders tried to anticipate and created various means to thwart and remove from public service, understanding centuries ago that a popular demagogic leader could emerge and attempt to consolidate authoritarian power not unlike the King they fought a war of independence to escape from.