Appeals court rejects Trump’s immunity claim
What happened
A federal appeals court this week unanimously rejected Donald Trump’s sweeping claim of immunity from prosecution for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, boosting the chances that he will stand trial before November’s election. Giving a president “unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power,” a threejudge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, would undermine our whole electoral process and “collapse our system of separated powers.” The judges, including a George H.W. Bush nominee who’d sided with Trump in prior cases, found Trump’s appeal antithetical to the Constitution, writing that “it would be a striking paradox” if the officeholder tasked with overseeing the faithful execution of federal law were also “above the law.”
The judges gave Trump six days to take his appeal to the Supreme Court, which he vowed to do, fuming on social media that without blanket criminal immunity, “A President will be afraid to act for fear of the opposite Party’s Vicious Retribution after leaving Office.” The Supreme Court was set this week to hear a separate Trump appeal over Colorado’s effort to disqualify him from its ballot for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. With Trump’s Washington, D.C., case on hold because of his immunity appeal, the first of his four criminal trials is likely to be in New York, where he’s set to stand trial March 25 over hush-money payments to a mistress ahead of the 2016 election.
What the columnists said
Trump’s “frivolous” bid for immunity is just a delaying tactic, said Ray Brescia in The Daily Beast. The judges’ emphatic ruling came an agonizing 28 days after oral arguments, when Trump’s lawyers made the “laughable” case that even if a president ordered SEAL Team 6 to kill an opponent, he’d be “immune from prosecution if he was not impeached and convicted” by Congress. The Supreme Court “should do what it does with thousands of cases” each year: refuse to intervene and “let the trial court get back to work.”
This is a case in which the Supreme Court may want the last word, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Claiming presidents have total criminal immunity is “obviously wrong.” But the D.C. Circuit went “overboard” by declaring that a president has “no immunity” at all. Presidents often do things that are later seen as violating statutes, such as President Truman’s seizure of steel mills. By the court’s logic, any such actions could expose presidents to prosecution after leaving office.
Timing is “everything,” said Timothy L. O’Brien in Bloomberg. Biden and Trump are statistically tied in polls. But if Trump is criminally convicted, 51 percent of poll respondents say they’d back Biden, while 45 percent would stick with Trump. Even if a verdict isn’t reached by then, a trial could damage Trump. One thing’s for sure: If he’s elected before a conviction, he will quash the prosecutions or seek to pardon himself.