Hugo Scheiber, Man Reading Newspaper, 1918
Yesterday was a huge news day. The top story was the decision by the DC Circuit Court ruling stating that Trump does not have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as president. Now Trump must decide by Monday whether to take the case to the Supreme Court.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments regarding the Colorado case arguing that the 14th Amendment makes Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s primary ballot.
Trump is also awaiting a decision from Judge Engoron in the New York fraud case that could potentially bankrupt him.
In addition, Republicans in the House and Speaker Mike Johnson failed miserably as he lost two votes he put on the floor: aid to Israel and impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. On top of that, the head of the RNC announced her resignation.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell knifed Senator James Lankford in the back after assigning him to negotiated a border bill that included aid to Ukraine and Israel. Democrats gave Republicans everything they wanted, but they backed down on Trump’s orders.
I’ll get to as many of these stories as I can.
Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein at Politico: Trump is not immune from prosecution for bid to subvert the 2020 election, appeals court rules.
Former President Donald Trump — and indeed any other former president — may be prosecuted for alleged crimes they committed while in office, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.
The unanimous 57-page decision from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is a major win for special counsel Jack Smith, who is seeking to put Trump on trial this year on federal felony charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump quickly vowed an appeal, which could be at the Supreme Court by Monday.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the D.C. Circuit judges wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
The ruling affirms U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s historic conclusion that former presidents may be prosecuted for crimes they committed in office, even if those alleged crimes arguably related to their official duties. Trump had argued that former presidents could not be prosecuted for such actions without first being impeached and convicted by Congress.
The judges put their decision on hold only until Monday to allow Trump to ask the Supreme Court to take up the immunity fight on an emergency basis. If he does so, the decision won’t take effect until the high court acts on his request, the appeals panel decreed.
Trump could also ask the D.C. Circuit to rehear the case. But the panel said doing that won’t delay the return of the case to Chutkan, the trial judge, unless the full bench of the D.C. Circuit agrees to a rehearing, which requires a majority of the 11 active appellate judges.
The force of Tuesday’s unanimous ruling Tuesday, backed by two liberal judges and one staunch conservative, may have been worth the wait for Smith. Rather than a splintered decision that could be picked apart more easily, the ruling lays out a groundbreaking legal and political framework for bringing a former president to trial.
The Newspaper, by Aldo Luongo
At The Atlantic, George Conway writes: An Airtight Ruling Against Trump. In a masterful opinion, the D.C. Circuit rejected the former president’s bid for immunity.
On July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering President Richard Nixon to produce the Watergate tapes, the president turned to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to understand what had just happened. He later recounted the exchange in his memoirs:
“Unanimous?” I guessed.
“Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all,” he said.
“None at all?” I asked.
“It’s tight as a drum.”
These words echoed through my mind today, nearly 50 years later, as I read the historic opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in United States v. Trump, holding that former President Donald Trump does not enjoy immunity from prosecution for any crimes he committed in attempting to end constitutional democracy in the United States.
The result was no surprise. As I said last month, no one who attended the oral argument could have believed Trump had any chance of prevailing. The question was timing: How long would an appeal delay Trump’s trial, originally scheduled for March 4? Many of us thought that the decision might come sooner, perhaps within days of the argument, given how quickly the court had scheduled briefing and argument. And by the end of last week, some commentators had, by their own reckoning, reached the “freakout stage” as to why the decision was taking so long.
They—and we—needn’t have worried. Issued exactly four weeks after the argument, the court’s decision came plenty fast. It’s not that often that you get a unanimous 57-page decision on novel questions of law in 28 days. And you almost never get an opinion of this quality in such a short period of time. I’ve read thousands of judicial opinions in my four decades as a law student and lawyer. Few have been as good as this one.
Unanimous. No air. Tight as a drum. The court’s per curiam opinion—per curiam meaning “for the court,” in that no individual judge authored it—is all that and more. It’s a masterful example of judicial craftsmanship on many levels. The opinion weaves together the factual context, the constitutional text, the judicial precedent, history, the parties’ concessions, and razor-sharp reasoning, with no modicum of judicial and rhetorical restraint, to produce an overwhelmingly cohesive, and inexorably convincing, whole. The opinion deserves a place in every constitutional-law casebook, and, most important—are you listening, members of the Supreme Court?—requires no further review.
The opinion far exceeds any commentator’s poor power to add or detract, so I’ll mostly let it speak for itself. The bottom line:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
I shared this as a gift link (see above), so you should be able to read the whole piece without a subscription.
You can also check out this article at Just Security: How Long Will Trump’s Immunity Appeal Take? Analyzing the Alternative Timelines.
On the Colorado case, Anne E. Marimow writes at The Washington Post: In Trump’s Colorado case, Supreme Court will make and face history.
The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the critical question of Donald Trump’s eligibility to return to the White House, hearing arguments in an unprecedented case that gives the justices a central role in charting the course of a presidential election for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.
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