U.S. Supreme Court dithers, democracy burns

Donald Trump should be on trial right now for his brazen attempt to overturn the 2020 election, subverting our republic.

But he isn’t.

And we can thank the U.S. Supreme Court for that.

He was scheduled to go on trial at the beginning of March, but his lawyers appealed with a ridiculous argument. They contended that presidents ought to be immune from prosecution for crimes they commit while in office.

Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected that nonsense, and so did the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose judges affirmed that presidents can and should be held to account — at least after their terms have expired — for illegal actions.

One of these judges asked Trump’s lawyers if a president ought to be immune from prosecution if he ordered Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival.

A member of Trump’s team must have felt like a consummate fool as he offered this reply: Only Congress has the constitutional power to address such matters — through impeachment. And that means our judiciary branch is rendered powerless when presidents break the law.

The Constitution says no such thing.

Trump and his lawyers kept appealing, and the Supreme Court decided to cooperate. It is now giving Trump and his lawyers — and the justices are also giving themselves — a leisurely interlude to ponder, to think, to pretend to themselves the clock is not ticking on the fate of our republic.

Under these particular circumstances, the justices’ decision to drag things out in this manner is so reckless that it constitutes a scandal.

They should have let the appeals court’s ruling stand — period.

After all, time is of the essence because of the threat that Trump represents to our democracy. Most of us watched him on live television as he goaded the violent mob that invaded the Capitol.

The question is whether that action (which was the culmination of much conspiratorial plotting with others) constituted insurrection, and the matter needs to be adjudicated — now — because Trump might try something like it again, or he may try something worse if he wins another term.

He says there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses the election. Conversely, he says he will “terminate” parts of the Constitution if he wins and punish “vermin.”

As with everything he does, his words are packed with an unmistakable threat of totalitarian violence. And it goes without saying that if Trump wins another term he will order the Justice Department to drop the case against himself.

Liz Cheney says we have eight months left to save our republic. Last December she warned that we are “sleep-walking into dictatorship.” Writer Robert Kagan claimed that dictatorship is unavoidable — that Trump will succeed in overturning our Constitution and nothing can be done to prevent it.

He might turn out to be right.

The legal issues regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn an election should be close to resolution at this moment. Everyone knows Trump’s ploy is to drag things out as the clock runs out on the election. He brags about it.

But because of the Supreme Court’s self-indulgence, the trial on the Jan. 6 insurrection is in limbo. Another trial is beginning, and a different trial might start after that, as the most important trial of all keeps slipping away as if we had all the time in the world.

How can our Supreme Court justices sleep at night?

Why are they behaving this way when it would have been so simple — and so responsible — to affirm the appeals court’s ruling and let the trial proceed, as it should have proceeded?

Why? Because they feel it is their constitutional duty to weigh in for however long it pleases them if they get a whiff of an issue they find interesting.

How very nice for them. This case does raise interesting questions of unprecedented magnitude. No former president has been prosecuted until now. But no president has dared to allegedly perpetrate such patently criminal deeds as Trump.

The Constitution is maddeningly vague about these matters, and it would be interesting to take a vacation from history and figure out exactly what actions of presidents ought to lead to prosecutions and specify exactly what can be done, and by whom, and how and when.

That is what these justices could not resist the temptation to do — to turn this emergency into a chance to create a new precedent to guide the republic down the years (at least until such time as another Supreme Court overturns it).

But we might not have a republic down the years if this dictator-in-the-making cannot be put on trial before the election.

The Supreme Court justices are coddling Trump because they are used to coddling themselves. Here’s hoping we survive their conceit.

Richard Striner’s latest book is “Ike in Love and War: How Dwight D. Eisenhower Sacrificed Himself to Keep the Peace.”