Roberts’ Rules: Presidents can kill like despots

Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 7, 2024, in New York City. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president to face trial on criminal charges. Photo by Sarah Yenesel-Pool/Getty Images.

Regrettably, but not surprisingly, the Supreme Court has now unleashed SEAL Team Six to murder anyone the president directs it to kill.

By focusing only on whether the president’s actions fall within his “official” constitutional duties, rather than the nature of the underlying conduct itself, the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts in the presidential immunity case, Trump v. United States, gives carte blanche to the ex-president, the current one and future Commanders-in-Chief.

It’s not only political rivals who can be killed at the whim of the president regardless of motivation and without recourse. That indulgence also would extend to anyone he or she wants eliminated.

It looks like ex-President Trump was correct when he famously said he could “shoot somebody” in the middle of Fifth Avenue “and not lose any voters.”

It not only would be devoid of deleterious impact on his supporters, but it would bar any legal consequences as long as it’s done by the military at his behest — even if the militia considers it to be unlawful.

Indeed, if a president, now or in the future, is upset by a ruling of the Supreme Court, he or she could order the Seal Team or other SWAT commandos under his authority to charge into the Supreme Court’s chambers — across the street from the site of the Jan. 6 insurrection, by the way — and slay the justices. It’s all within his “official” duties as Commander-in-Chief.

The Chief Justice wove together his six-member majority with two gimmes: Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. The former was indisputably in the bag and flying his flag high in favor of even broader full-scale immunity based upon his remark at oral arguments in April that a president needs to be free of legal constraints to assure that he (or she) will follow the law without fear of being prosecuted by later administrations.

That’s probably one of the grossest non-sequiturs issued from that once-exalted body since it declared, before the Civil War, that a Black person is not a “person” in the eyes of the law. Or, nearly 40 years later, that segregation of people of color constitutes “separate but equal” treatment.

As for Thomas, he joined the majority opinion despite it not engaging in the three-pronged analysis that he deems talismanic to constitutional adjudication: text, history, and tradition.

Criminal immunity for a president lacks all three: nothing that says so in the Constitution, although it does refer to potential criminal prosecution in connection with impeachment offenses; there is no historical analog for immunity ever since King George III’s statute was toppled 248 years ago this week following adoption of the Declaration of Independence; and no tradition exists of any president seeking or obtaining immunity for criminality, even the venal Richard Nixon, who didn’t need one after his pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Yet, the absence of all three of those features didn’t deter Thomas from subscribing to the decision by the Chief Justice — perhaps before taking off for another all-expense paid luxury vacation provided by a right-wing billionaire “friend” or a jaunt around the country with his MAGA wife, Ginny, in the ultra RV furnished to him by his wealthy pal.

But the logical extension of Roberts’ rationale has broad tentacles in addition to permitting outright murder. Since the president’s constitutional authority includes providing pardons, nothing would prevent — or penalize — him from taking bribes for granting them.

By the same reasoning, the chief executive’s constitutional authority to appoint ambassadors and other officials and employees of the federal government could be used to solicit pay-offs to the president, the President’s party, family members, friends, or anyone else for that matter, auctioning the positions off them to the highest bidders. That could make for an engaging reality television show: “We’re Making a Deal” or “America’s Got Graft.”

There are a myriad of other illegalities that could occur within the “official” presidential duties enumerated in Article II of the Constitution or implied from them that are given free passes by the deplorable ruling that might go down in infamy as Roberts’ Rules of Disorder.

One of the justices, Neil Gorsuch, remarked at oral arguments that the Court’s ruling would be “one for the ages.”

This one is not going to age well.

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