A Disturbing Day at the Supreme Court

Nothing shakes the confidence of an old-fashioned institutionalist like me more than listening to this Supreme Court conduct oral arguments.

A Disturbing Day at the Supreme Court

Nothing shakes the confidence of an old-fashioned institutionalist like me more than listening to this Supreme Court conduct oral arguments.

While the questions posed by the justices don't always predict their votes, the incredibly obtuse arguments and ludicrous hypotheticals we heard suggests there are not five votes for simply declaring Donald Trump lacks immunity for acts conducted while president and allowing federal charges of election meddling to quickly proceed.

More likely we will get five votes for limiting the charges, sending the case back to a lower court to determine which charges can still be prosecuted, and causing further delay of justice.

To help you be smarter than a Supreme Court justice, I want to point you toward the Washington Monthly's past work on the immunity challenge.

But first, here's what's leading the Monthly website:

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Day Six of the Trump Trial: A Bench Slap and Pecker on the Stand: Contributing Editor Jonathan Alter continues to deliver inside-the-courtroom details of the Trump hush money trial you can't get anywhere else. Click here for the full story and click here for Alter's Day Five dispatch.

The Divestment Encampments Don’t Make Any Sense: My examination of the flawed strategic thinking behind the recent spate of campus protests regarding the Israel-Gaza war. Click here for the full story.

Poland Shows That Democracy Can Triumph. Here’s How: John Austin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Lucas Kreuzer and Kamil Lungu, graduate students at Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Affairs, show how Americans can learn from how Poland's Civic Platform party overcame right-wing authoritarianism. Click here for the full story.

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Back in December, Contributing Writer Peter M. Shane picked apart Trump's immunity claim, reviewing the constitutional history and noting, "No court comprising constitutional originalists will uphold Trump’s arguments."

In February, Shane analyzed the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Trump did not have immunity and concluded, "If that Court of Appeals assessment is inaccurate, ours is not a government of laws." Elizabeth B. Wydra and Nina Henry of the Constitutional Accountability Center drew a similar conclusion. (Earlier, Alter and Cliff Sloan, a Georgetown law professor, reported on the oral arguments at the D.C. Circuit.)

Last month James D. Zirin, a former federal prosecutor, provided the pessimistic view that the Supreme Court's conservative majority could grant Trump "blanket immunity," having already "stood originalism and textualism on its head" when overruling Colorado's decision to keep Trump off of the ballot for engaging in insurrection.

We may avoid blanket presidential immunity, but we may get the next worst outcome.

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Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor