Subject: Re: Trump Was Right. He Owns SCOTUS
Why insert a gratuitous "alleged"?

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Exactly. This was discussed by Laurence Tribe last night on Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

O'Donnell had previously tried to make the point that the wording of the statement to the attorneys outlining what the court wanted argued threw out half of Trump's case. However, Tribe noted that the court NORMALLY operates under a rule of thumb that says when you have to rule on something, the ruling should be as NARROWLY defined in scope as possible while addressing the issues of the case. Taking a case focused on an issue in law that is a square yard in dimension then making a ruling that impacts a square mile is NOT what any court should be doing. Tribe said by adding that word "alleged" to its direction to the parties, it was doing exactly that.

What is very disappointing is that they would formulate the question presented at a level of enormous abstraction so that the delay that we've already seen may just be the beginning. The question now presented is now whether and to what extent does a President have immunity after he leaves office from criminal prosecution for conduct "alleged" to involve official acts during his tenure. Well of course, Donald Trump "alleges" that everything was an official act. Jack Smith is at the opposite end. Instead of that, if they really had any interest in expedition, any interest in satisfying the public need to get this trial going and have a verdict one way or the other before the election, they would have asked a narrower question. They would have simply asked whether any president charged with criminally seeking to remain in office beyond the end of his term has absolute immunity from prosecutiion for crimes committed in that vein. THAT would have been the right question to ask and it would only have one answer.

This question is so sweeping, that there are a lot of ways of answering it. Yes the president might have SOME degree of immunity for SOME official acts but that is not the real issue. John Roberts long ago said if a case doesn't require you to answer a particular question, then as a federal judicial official, you SHOULDN'T answer that question. You shouldn't reach out. By reaching out in this way, the court has guaranteed not only that there would be this bizarre delay - they could have taken this issue before them back in December. Nt only there would be that delay but now the delay until late April before hearing the case? There's no reason to have that several month delay. In the Bush v Gore case, everything moved 10 times as fast.

This is a much simpler matter. It could have been resolved quite quickly and the really wierd thing is that essentially everyone knows where the story has to end. It CANNOT be the case that when a President is in office and tries to remain in office after losing an election and commits the crimes that are involved in that, that he is forever immune from prosecution, yet that is what would have to happen to give this President immunity. So since we know that's where the story has to end, to drag it out this way and have a virtual guarantee that the court won't decide anything until late June, it might decide this broad legal question and send the case back to the DC circuit, even if it doesn't, no tiral is likely to begin before October. In any event, no verdict of either kind, acquit or convict, is likely to happen before the election. And as a result, the people of the United States are confronted with basically a Supreme Court that is suppressing evidence, surpressing evidence tat they need in order to decide intelligently whether the person they are voting for is guilty of the extreme felony of trying to steal an election and remain in office. That's an unconscionable way to proceed and yet that's what the Supreme Court has arranged by the way it has organized this case.

What does "alleged" mean? Does it mean any crime that a potential PRESIDENT says OTHERS have ALLEGED that he did falls under whatever ruling they come up with? Or does "alleged" mean "as charged" by a prosecutor? Why would any competent judge further cloud such an already fraught issue with needless ambiguity?

In the same episode, Neal Katyal, who actually appeared in front of the Supreme Court the morning of 2/28/2024 presenting another case, provided commentary as well. He is in an awkward ethical position because in some sense, he obviously cannot say EVERYTHING he thinks about what the court is doing lest they hold his comments against him (and his clients) as he continues to work in front of the court. However, his disgust seemed pretty evident. O'Donnell asked him to outline his best argument FOR the court taking this case. His best argument was that many legal experts raised eyebrows last week when Trump's lawyers filed the same "Presidential immunity" based request for dismissing his documents indictments in Florida. At that point, these experts all arrived at the same concern... The Florida district and the DC district are two different circuits and operate under their own precedents. Having Trump file "immunity" based requests for dismissal in two different federal court districts inevitably meant that different outcomes would REQUIRE the issue to come up to the USSC to set a SINGLE precedent good across the entire system. The USSC may have looked at that Florida filing and concluded, "Crap, we're gonna have to hear this anyway cuz it will come up to us inevitably."

That makes sense in a purely legal mechanical sense but yet it doesn't. This issue shouldn't even be a judgment call in ANY jurisdiction of the courts. The infamous "SEAL Team 6" argument made by John Sauer a few weeks ago in front of the USSC should have been enough for the judges to rule in real time, laugh the case out of court and set a simple, iron-clad, unambiguous precedent and allow these cases to proceed immediately. "No active or former President is immune from criminal prosecution DURING OR AFTER their terms in office of state or federal crimes CONDUCTED prior to, during or after any of their terms of office."

My concern at this point is that nearly every highly respected legal mind, liberal or conservative (in the 1970s traditional sense), has been completely suprised by Supreme Court actions over the past 2-3 years. I keep seeing phrases like "we all know what the outcome has to be based on law and precedent" yet we keep getting surprised. That means the majority on the court ISN'T following precedent, ISN'T ruling based upon accurate interpretations of existing laws and ISN'T shying away from literally making facts and history up to justify whatever they decide they want to do to push their agenda. The decision required here would be a no-brainer for any judge within -0.7 to +0.7 of a normal distribution of judicial temperment and political bent. This court has five jurists who are in the +0.95 range of thought who are growing more emboldened with each case. Keep in mind, while announcing this case would be taken up, the notification did NOT state that Clarence Thomas would be recusing himself from participating. His wife could literally be subjected to criminal prosecution for participation in the election rejection scheme. She actively, repeatedly communicated with multiple actors affected by the current criminal case encouraging the effort.


WTH