Listening to the oral arguments today and there were two things I really found jarring, wondering what your perspective is on these.
The first is the fact that the justices along with Trump’s lawyer continually emphasized the need to separate out private acts from official acts because they seemed to all endorse the idea that official acts must have some sort of immunity if not absolute. This notion seems to ignore the very idea of corruption as a concept.
Corruption is when an individual uses the power of their office for personal or private gain. If an act is private, corruption cannot definitionally occur. It is only when an official takes an official act that corruption is even a possibility, so how on earth does an act being considered official become a shield of sorts from being prosecuted? That position tautologically legalizes corruption.
The second thing I found maddening was the hypotheticals the conservative justices seemed to be concerned about. Adopting the Trump narrative that future administrations would just prosecute their predecessors for anything, they presented multiple hypotheticals of such. But here’s the thing, every one of these hypotheticals stands on the premise that the prosecuting administration is corruptly abusing the powers of their office. So in order for that hypothetical to even occur we’re already imagining a corrupt administration, and the remedy for this is to ensure these future corrupt administrations cannot be prosecuted?
This is absurd for two reasons. First is because there already exists protections for former presidents, most basic is the presumption of innocence. To get a conviction you need to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the former president’s corrupt intent, that’s a very high bar. Meanwhile the only check against a corrupt president is the threat of prosecution. So to focus on the side that is already protected while ignoring the other is absurd on its face.
But even worse is that since we are assuming corrupt administrations to begin with, by removing the threat of prosecution we’re only encouraging future administrations to do whatever they want, like, say, imprisoning their political opponents. So the proposed remedy on the table will only encourage the very behavior the conservative justices are imagining in their doomsday scenarios. That is completely self defeating.
Curious to know how you all saw it.
