To the Editor:

Last week, SCOTUS heard arguments on presidential immunity. No president before Trump has sunk so low as to demand a radical revision of the authority of the American presidency to include absolute immunity for acts committed during his presidency. The only fun to be had was to watch conservative SCOTUS abandon their “Originalist” playlist for purely political motives, and watch Clarence Thomas pretend he wasn’t the Ginny-skunk at the party.

Denying the liberal minority’s attempts to stick to the facts of the pleadings, the conservative majority was instead consumed with a kaleidoscope of hypotheticals. If a future unknown president were to order the assassination of a political rival, or initiate a military coup, or sell nuclear secrets to a foreign nation, should he be immune from criminal prosecution? “It depends,” was defendant’s answer.

Consumed with lurid “what if’s,” conservative SCOTUS ignored the real issue: whether Trump’s planning, urging, and incitement of the insurrectionists before and on January 6 to intimidate VP Pence and Congress to bend to his will and interfere with a congressional election duty (as well as creation of phony slates of MAGA electors in several states), is entitled to presidential immunity under the Constitution. They toyed instead with a new Constitutional test: whether a president was acting in his “official” concern for the nation or his own “private” interests in, hypothetically, assassinating a political rival. It didn’t occur to conservative SCOTUS that an immune president would not be criminally constrained from targeting them.

Trump also argued that if he were not declared immune, before being criminally prosecuted, he would first have had to be impeached and convicted in Congress, an impossibility since he is no longer president. Contrarily, Trump insisted during the January 6 impeachment process that post-presidency criminal prosecution - and not impeachment - was the only remedy for his high crimes. Now, Trump needs an “alternate truth,” but surely even this SCOTUS won’t masticate that cow pie.

Political affairs analyst David Rothkopf said, “the court is leaning toward creating new immunity protections for a president….We’re watching the Constitution be rewritten in front of our eyes.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarians, fascism, and democracy observed, “the idea of having immunity for a military coup [be] taken seriously…is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and involves giving them a respected platform.”

How are we at a point where SCOTUS will consider and debate presidential impunity for a military coup or assassination of a political rival? Do you hear the whisper of “banana republic”?

Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.