America doesn’t need a king

But the unhinged, un-American US Supreme Court gave us one anyway

One year ago this week the US Supreme Court handed down a decision so alien in spirit and corrosive in its implications that it can fairly be termed regime change. In Trump v. United States, the Court ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for all “core official acts” and presumptive immunity for any other official conduct while in office.

It was a gift to Donald Trump, of course — delivered just in time to complicate or derail the criminal cases pending against him. But it was also a blueprint for authoritarianism in a country that was expressly created to prevent it. Words can hardly express the outrage and irony of it.

The United States has never seen anything like this – not even when Richard Nixon mused that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” The Court’s ruling does not merely protect the presidency — it elevates it well beyond what the Constitution and the early traditions of the Republic ever intended. What the Founders envisioned as a powerful but accountable executive has been reimagined as a sovereign immune from consequence.

I’m no fan of the idea that the Founders and Framers and so on were gods incapable of wrong – it is infantile, and itself un-American. Indeed, they were deeply flawed and (obviously) not representative and the system they set up has a built-in time bomb because entrenched nonsense is almost impossible to amend given the high bar and demographic distribution of the population. But one thing they got absolutely right was the need to limit executive power.