In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. U.S., which effectively put the American presidency above the law, a great many observers started imagining the practical implications of a lawless presidency. In fact, one of the dissenters in the case explored some of those possibilities.
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
Hours later, as The Hill noted, Congress’ top Republican lawmaker adopted a far more relaxed posture.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday shrugged off Democrats’ concern over the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, calling their fears of future presidential criminality “madness.”
“Look, there’s all sorts of hyperbole tonight … and just this, fantastical, these hypotheticals they’ve made up [that] future presidents are going to turn into assassins and all the rest,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox News. “It’s madness.”
Johnson added, “Listen, remember this. The president and vice president are the only two officers in our constitutional system that are elected by all the people, no one who is elected to that office is going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity.”
The House speaker’s lack of concern is well taken. Why assume that the United States would ever have a president who engaged in “crazy criminal activity”?
It’s not as if Americans have ever seen a president who, for example, ran a fraudulent charity, a fraudulent “university,” and a business that was convicted on multiple felony fraud counts. And it’s not as if we’d have a president who launched an illegal extortion scheme against a foreign ally in the hopes that he’d help the incumbent cheat in an election. And the United States would certainly never elect a president who falsified business records as part of an illegal hush-money scheme after allegedly cheating on his third wife with a porn star. And it’s silly to think an American president would defy a federal subpoena and keep highly sensitive national security secrets at his glorified country club. And voters would obviously never elect a president who tried to use the levers of federal power to target his perceived political foes in his own country. And we’d never elect someone who was held liable for sexual assault, just as it’s silly to think an American president would get indicted for trying to overturn an election and deploying a radicalized mob to attack the U.S. Capitol as part of an apparent coup attempt. Given these realizations, Johnson’s case sure is persuasive. No one elected to the nation’s highest office would ever be prone to “crazy criminal activity.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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