“Something’s Rotten About the Justices Taking So Long on Trump’s Immunity Case”

Supreme Court

Leah Litman NYT oped:

This court has lost the benefit of the doubt for myriad reasons, including its willingness to act quickly in cases that benefit Republican interests. In addition to the disqualification case, two and a half years ago, the court scheduled a challenge to the Biden administration’s test-or-vaccinate policy two weeks after the justices decided to hear it, and then issued a decision invalidating the policy less than one week later.

In a case in South Carolina decided by the court 6-3 in May, it was not speed but sloth that aided Republicans. The court allowed the state to continue using a 2021 congressional map that a lower court had found was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Both parties in the case had asked the court to rule by Jan. 1; when no decision was issued by mid-March, a district court panel ordered the contested map to be used in this fall’s election.

In the immunity case, the question before the court is this: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

In addressing that question, the court could follow a path well charted in other cases and rule narrowly. The justices need not resolve anything and everything related to presidential immunity. It would be enough to conclude that whatever the precise bounds of presidential immunity, it doesn’t extend to orchestrating a monthslong effort to overturn the valid results of a presidential election.

Even if presidents enjoy some immunity for official acts, plotting to remain in office while continuing to question the results of an election they clearly lost isn’t one of them.

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“Dark ‘Oro y Plata’ in Montana: The Green Amendment’s Defense of Campaign Finance Transparency”

campaign finance

Lucas Della Ventura has written this article, 48 Wm. & Mary Env’t L. & Pol’y Rev. 385 (2024). Here is the abstract:

In the post–Citizens United dark money age, state disclosure regulations are the last line of defense for citizens to learn who is behind unlimited independent expenditures and electioneering communications flooding their states. Underpinning the ability of state governments to promulgate such transparency measures are the informational benefits provided to the public. However, the Supreme Court’s decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta to invalidate a California disclosure regulation on dark money groups, marks disclosure regulations—the Court’s repeated fallback when striking down more robust campaign finance regulations—with a bull’s-eye. In the face of repeated legal challenges to disclosure regulations, advocates for transparency should conceptualize the scope of the informational interest more broadly to encompass not only the interests of voters, but also the interests of states in upholding state constitutional rights dependent on disclosure information. States like Montana, which have affirmative duties under their constitutions to protect the right to a clean and healthful environment, also known as “green amendments,” have a compelling interest in upholding disclosure provisions because such protection hinges on the information provided by campaign finance disclosures.

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“Deans from America’s law schools unveil joint letter in defense of democracy”

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Release:

The ABA Task Force for American Democracy unveiled a letter signed by more than 100 deans from America’s law schools concerning the training necessary for the next generation of lawyers to sustain our constitutional democracy and the rule of law. 

In their letter, this distinct group of educators — charged with training our nation’s lawyers — affirms their commitment to preparing the next generation of legal advocates to uphold democracy and the rule of law. The message articulated by the deans urges students to champion the Constitution and the rule of law through avenues such as clinical work, public education and advocacy as well as makes a commitment on the deans’ part to teach our nation’s law students to disagree respectfully, be open to others’ arguments and engage across partisan and ideological divides.

Read the letter here.

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Must read Katherine Miller: “The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We”

election subversion risk

Katherine Miller NYT column:

The riot at the Capitol was happening and then it wasn’t. Mr. Trump eventually left, but didn’t leave. The House impeached, but the Senate acquitted. Prosecutors brought charges, but the process has spooled out into an in-between place.

Committees aired hearings and released transcripts; people wrote books and filed civil suits; individuals such as Rudy Giuliani have faced punishing financial penalties. And we have learned more and worse details about the inner workings of the Trump White House that melted down into disaster.

But Mr. Trump might still become president again, and he has never let go of the idea that animated Jan. 6 — that the election was stolen from him — and that idea has hardened in regular people.

It’s as if the country had a simultaneous, destabilizing experience, and it’s sitting there under the surface, and it must be doing something to the American psyche.

One of the things that makes Jan. 6 hard to neatly contain in the collective memory is the emotional, sloppy, accidental disaster nature of it. The event unfolded in public, and learning more about the lead-up to it tends to affirm the broad contours of what we knew when it took place. The select committee testimony and hearings, the indictments and civil suits and the many reported books are filled with examples of how ill conceived so much of what led to Jan. 6 was — and yet it eventually became a surreal scene where real people died, the police got beaten with American flags, aides and lawmakers ran and hid, and hundreds of people who believed Mr. Trump got wrapped up in the legal system.

The origin point of that day was Mr. Trump’s inability to accept that he lost, but everything in service of it is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not as if anybody needs a trial to form an opinion about Jan. 6. It’s not even that the criminal justice system absolutely had to be the way to handle this matter; it wasn’t, and charging or convicting Mr. Trump might have unintended consequences.

But a trial was possibly the last remaining avenue for a public re-examination of Jan. 6, certainly before the election, and possibly for years. Everyone has instead lived through an intense period of anticipating that consideration and its potential consequence, without getting it.

What all this lack of resolution can obscure is how fundamental this is to Mr. Trump as a political figure. Jan. 6 and his expansive idea of power being taken from him is something the voter has to embrace or reject or ignore or try to square with the other things the voter might care about. That the election was stolen from him is what Mr. Trump cares about, and that the transfer of power must take place is what the country was founded on, and that Mr. Trump’s endless words can manifest in cataclysmic real-life action is what people fear and the most hard-core supporters love about Mr. Trump….

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