How SCOTUS 'matched' Trump’s 'hypocrisy and bad faith' during immunity arguments: political scientist

29 April 2024

Thursday, April 25 was a very eventful day for former President Donald Trump.

While former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker continued to testify in Trump's hush money/falsified business records trial in Manhattan, nine U.S. Supreme Court justices heard arguments for and against Trump's absolute immunity argument.

Trump is claiming that because he was still president in late 2020 and early 2021, he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case.

In a biting op-ed published by The Hill on April 29, political science professor Austin Sarat — who teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts — slams the High Court's GOP-appointed justices for the way they handled Trump's absolute immunity claims four days earlier.

"While the questions asked at oral argument are not always a reliable predictor of how the Court will ultimately come out in any case," Sarat explains, "Thursday was not a good day for American democracy. As it has done in other cases, the Court's conservative majority seemed ready to jettison its own originalist interpretive method and to ignore the grave threat that former President Trump's election denialism — and efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power — posed to our constitutional republic."

Sarat notes that Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, commented, "I'm not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives." And Justice Samuel Alito, similarly, said, "I'm not focused on the here and now of this case. I'm very concerned about the future.”

Gorsuch, Sarat laments, "revealed his embrace of Trump's substantive position: that the real problem was not what the former president did after the 2020 election, but what was being done to him by his 'political opponents.'"

"They displayed a level of hypocrisy, cynicism and bad faith that matched Trump's own, and seemed to lust for the kind of strong executive that has become a familiar part of the agenda of Trump and his MAGA allies," Sarat argues. "One can only hope that the justices will come to their senses when they get around to deciding the case, and will reject Trump's plea to take the unprecedented step of establishing presidential immunity."

Austin Sarat's full op-ed for The Hill is available at this link (subscription required).

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