I have come to expect some outlandish ideas to come out of the mouths of Donald Trump, his lackeys/supporters like Rudy Giuliani, and appointees like former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. I’m no longer surprised when conservatives who opposed Trump like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Nevertheless last week I was stunned to learn the Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito thought it might be a good idea for presidents to have total immunity for any action taken while in office including private actions.
The Supreme Court held oral arguments for 2 and half hours last week regarding whether or not the case for attempting to overturn election results through fraud could go to trial. Speaking to Michael Dreeben, an attorney representing special counsel Jack Smith, Alito began by stating: “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is the incumbent?” I think any reasonable person would agree so to that point but then Alito follow up with: “Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
The Supreme Court is known for looking deeply at the issues before it in regard to the meaning of the law, the applicability of various aspects of the constitution, and the potential future consequences of the decision they render, as well as precedent and history. If Justice Alito's concern about consequences were valid then shouldn't there be historical evidence to support it? In the nearly 250 years of our democracy, power has been transferred from a president to his successor post-election 40 times. On 11 of those occasions the challenger defeated an incumbent, a situation that is fraught with bitterness and the potential for messy post-election actions. Yet, there has been only one losing incumbent to have been further troubled by attempts to prosecute them and that ex-president is Donald J. Trump.
There's a reason Trump is being prosecuted in four separate courts, he's the only ex-president who tried to foment a coup against the United States of America and denying the rights of millions of voters by overturning a free and fair election. He's also the only ex-president to have claimed to have declassified sensitive national security documents in his head then kept them as souvenirs even after being asked to return them, denying that he had them, and then went out of his way to try to hide them.
Alito is often considered an originalist in that his interpretations of law are based on the original meaning of the words and phrases in the constitution as well as the perceived intent of the founding fathers. In this instance it’s pretty clear that’s all a crock because the nation’s founders were revolutionaries who made it quite clear that unlike a king no one in this land is above the law, not even ex-presidents.
Trump must be tried in order to insure that he remains the anomaly that he is today and future presidents think twice before attempting to remain in office after losing.
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