Roberts's majority backs Trump in finding an expansive presidential immunity

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( [Abbreviated Pundit Roundup]( is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet. - [Roberts's majority backs Trump in finding an expansive presidential immunity]( Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s decision, making those broad pronouncements in Trump’s challenge to the special counsel’s indictment of the former president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Roberts did so, moreover, with no clear textual support in the Constitution — and a considerable historical record to the contrary. “[T]he system of separated powers designed by the Framers has always demanded an energetic, independent Executive,” Roberts wrote. “The President therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the Democratic appointees in dissent of the bottom-line result, “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding,” concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” It was another ruling — to quote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in this term’s earlier corruption case decision — that “only today’s Court could love.” - [Daily Kos can't survive on ad revenue alone. We haven't been able to for a decade. Support us by giving $3 a month.]( - [The Supreme Court Puts Trump Above the Law]( The Court’s opinion presents an absurd paradox that defeats the purpose of a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law. It has little basis in the Constitution or in the words of the Founders. It is the outcome that most benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate, while allowing the justices to live with themselves for defacing beyond recognition the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination. [...] Throughout the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts often sounds more like Trump’s lawyer than the impartial judge he presents himself as. Roberts writes that “with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.” If that applies, as the Court holds, to a sitting president manufacturing a scheme to avoid relinquishing power after losing an election, then there is no legal constraint on a president simply refusing to leave office and using his authority to find a pretext for doing so. We can debate the nuances of history, the Framers’ intentions, or the text of the Constitution. What the Founders of the United States did not intend to do, when they designed a constitutional system of checks and balances, was establish a government that would allow someone to declare themselves president for life if they felt like it. The Court writes that presidents cannot be prosecuted for “use” of their official powers, but what it actually means is they cannot be prosecuted for the flagrant abuse of them. That renders the plain disclaimer on which the opinion rests—that the president is not above the law—a lie. More significant, this opinion depends on an implicit belief that the only person who would act so brazenly is Trump, and that because the majority of the justices on the Court support Trump and want him to be president, he must be shielded from prosecution. In this backhanded manner, Trump’s justices acknowledge that he poses a unique threat to constitutional government, one they just happen to support because he is their guy. These are not justices; these are Trump cronies. This is not legal reasoning; this is vandalism. - [The Supreme Court also handed down a hugely important First Amendment case]( Just a few minutes before the Supreme Court handed down its Trumpdecision, however, it also handed down another case reaffirming that the First Amendment does not permit Republican-led legislatures to seize control of what content is published by media companies. That decision, in Moody v. Netchoice, was 6-3, with three Republican justices who also held that the leader of the Republican Party was allowed to commit many crimes while he was in office joining Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion. So, on the same day that the Supreme Court appears to have established that a sitting president can commit the most horrible crimes imaginable against someone who dares to speak out against him, the same Court — with three justices joining both decisions — holds that the First Amendment still imposes some limits on the government’s ability to control what content appears online. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined both decisions in full. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Netchoice opinion in full, plus nearly all of the Trump decision. It’s impossible to comprehend the value system that would lead a justice to join both decisions, but nevertheless here we are. That said, the Court’s decision in Netchoice is a victory for free speech, even if it comes the same day as one of the most chilling decisions in the Court’s history. - [Trump Immunity Ruling Will Be John Roberts’ Legacy to American Democracy]( Tellingly, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion spends not a moment condemning the violence in the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying how awful the allegations against Trump are if true, or even celebrating peaceful transitions of power and reaffirming American democracy. It fell to Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson to do this in their dissenting opinions in this case, in the Fisher case, and in Trump v. Anderson, the case holding that Colorado could not remove Trump from the ballot on grounds that Trump engaged in insurrection in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. [...] Near the end of his majority opinion in the immunity ruling, Roberts plays the role of the faux minimalist, as he often likes to do, pretending that when he is making major changes in the law he is really doing very little. He did this, for example, in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holdercase killing off a key part of the Voting Rights Act. There he told us that Congress could tinker and fix the formula used to figure out which states need federal supervision of their voting rules, and that there were other voting rights protections under the law. He wrote that knowing Congress would not act. The Roberts Court would then whittle away those other protections in subsequent years. [...] Even putting aside the risks for future presidential authoritarianism, Roberts offers no acknowledgement that the court’s fact-intensive, slow-moving process has let Donald Trump run out the clock on claims of election subversion in 2020. Roberts surely was aware that this was an implication of the decision and surely the risks to democracy from this decision had to have crossed his mind. - [France’s Far Right Is Bad. But Not as Hypocritical as MAGA.]( Like almost every other wealthy nation, France experienced a burst of inflation as the world economy recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic — in fact, if you use comparable measures, prices in France have risen by roughly the same amount as prices in the United States. But also as in America, inflation has declined rapidly without a jump in unemployment, and the current state of the economy looks quite good by historical standards. [...] ...on economic policy the R.N. has basically campaigned against Macron from the left. It has promised to lower the retirement age for many workers while cutting the value-added tax — basically a sales tax — on energy. How would it pay for these measures? By cutting benefits to immigrants. In case you’re wondering: No, the numbers don’t work. But setting math aside, the R.N. has, in effect, staked out a position in favor of big government and generous social benefits, but essentially only for people with the right ethnic background. The contrast with Trumpism should be obvious. - [Abortion is Healthcare! Make sure everyone knows with this t-shirt]( - [The Rubik’s Cube Turns 50]( Mr. Rubik dates the Cube to the spring of 1974. Preparing a course on descriptive geometry and tinkering with the five Platonic solids, he had become especially taken by the cube. But, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Cubed, The Puzzle of Us All,” for quite a while it “never once occurred to me that I was creating a puzzle.” [...] CubeLovers was among the first internet mailing lists — the inaugural message was sent by an M.I.T. student in July 1980: “I don’t know what we will be talking about, but another mailing list cannot hurt (too much).” In March 1981, with the Cube having been renamed for Rubik and populating American toy stores, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter diagnosed the craze as “cubitis magikia” — “a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips, which can be relieved only by prolonged contact with a multicolored cube,” he wrote in his column for Scientific American. He added: “Symptoms often last for months. Highly contagious.” By November 1982, the mania had subsided — “Rubik’s Cube: A Craze Ends,” declared a headline in the The New York Times. But it was resurrected in the 1990s by the World Wide Web. In 2023, Spin Master, the toy company that now owns the brand, globally sold 7.4 million units, including both the classic Cube and related twisty puzzles. Ben Varadi, a Spin Master co-founder, noted that Rubik’s has “95 percent brand awareness” — virtually everyone has heard of it. Rubik’s lore also holds that one in seven people on Earth have played with the Cube. “It gives me hope about the world,” Mr. Rubik told his audience in San Francisco. “It brings people together.” Want to write your own stories? [Log in]( or [sign up]( to post articles and comments on Daily Kos, the nation's largest progressive community. Follow Daily Kos on [Facebook](, [Threads](, and [Instagram](. Thanks for all you do, The Daily Kos team We're not asking for much Over the past 12 months, the average donation to Daily Kos has been just $9.44. These donations may seem small, but they're a big deal to us. In fact, they are our largest source of income. We literally couldn't do the work we do without them. 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