The Supreme Court: The President is Not a King!

The Supreme Court dealt President Trump two legal defeats on July 9, 2020. In one case Trump vs. Vance, I was a member of a bipartisan group of 17 former Members of Congress to sign on to an Amicus brief to the Court. We are pleased the Court agreed with our historical arguments and rejected President Trump’s argument that he is immune from state investigation. 

Key Takeaways on the Supreme Court decision:

• The President is not above the law.
• The President is not absolutely immune from state or congressional investigators.
• Courts can and must step in and resolve these disputes — as the Supreme Court did today.
• Vance is a clear loss for the President. The Court completely rejected his absolute immunity argument and made crystal clear that he is “subject to the law.”
• This is the key paragraph: “Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding. We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the President is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.
• The other case, Mazars, balances the competing interests of the branches, and rejects the more extreme heightened standard that Trump and DOJ were pushing.
• While it’s very unlikely that Trump will be forced to turn over his financial information in either case before the November election, taken together today was a significant win for our democracy and a rejection of Trump’s monarchical view of the presidency.  The court implicitly debunked the crackpot idea of the unified theory of executive power that Attorney General Barr and others have pushed. It essentially means that whatever the President does, it’s legal.
• Today the Court said the President is not above the law, that he does not have absolute immunity from investigation or congressional subpoena.

Many of Trump’s arguments were rebutted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed I co-wrote back on March 2nd with Donald Ayer and Christine Todd Whitman, “Will the Supreme Court Crown Trump as King?”

I believe our comments stood up well in today’s Supreme Court Decision.

Image credit: © FT montage/Getty