In August of 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation Thursday reaffirming that presidents do not have immunity for criminal actions, an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s landmark decision the month before.
Schumer’s No Kings Act would attempt
to invalidate the decision by declaring that presidents are not immune from
criminal law and clarifying that Congress, not the Supreme Court, determines to
whom federal criminal law is applied.
The court’s conservative majority decided July 1 that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken within their official duties —
a decision that threw into
doubt the Justice Department’s case against Republican former President Donald
Trump for his
efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
(As a reminder, Auschwitz was within the official duties of Nazi leaders.)
Schumer, of New York, said that Congress has an obligation and the constitutional authority to check the Supreme Court on its decision.
”Given the dangerous and consequential implications of the court’s
ruling, legislation would be the fastest and most efficient method to
correcting the grave precedent the Trump ruling presented,” he said.
The Senate bill, which has more than
two dozen Democratic cosponsors, comes after Democratic President Joe Biden
called on lawmakers earlier this week to ratify a constitutional amendment
limiting presidential immunity, along with establishing term limits and an
enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices. Rep. Joseph
Morelle, D-N.Y., recently proposed a constitutional amendment in the House.
The Supreme Court’s immunity decision
stunned Washington and drew a
sharp dissent from the court’s liberal justices warning of the perils
to democracy, particularly as Trump seeks a return to the White House.
Trump celebrated the decision as a
“BIG WIN” on his social media platform, and Republicans in Congress rallied
around him. Without GOP support, Schumer’s bill has little chance of passing in
the narrowly divided chamber.
Speaking about Biden’s proposal,
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said that Biden’s proposal would
“shred the Constitution.”
A constitutional amendment would be
even more difficult to pass. Such a resolution takes a two-thirds vote in
both the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely at this time of
divided government, and ratification by three-fourths of the states. That
process could take several years.
Still, Democrats see the proposals as
a warning to the court and an effort that will rally their voting base ahead
of the presidential
election.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is
running against Trump in the November election, said earlier this week the
reforms are needed because “there is a clear crisis of confidence
facing the Supreme Court.”
The title of Schumer’s bill harkens
back to Justice
Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the case, in which she said that “in
every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
The decision “makes a mockery of the
principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no
man is above the law,” Sotomayor said.
Even though the COP now has the slimmest House majority in
decades, there is still little chance that the bill would pass today – but the 2026
mid-terms could change that.
By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has no respect for the
law.
When a federal judge put his spending freeze on hold, he said
that the law really does not apply to him.
The appeal came as Trump, key
members of his administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk have been criticizing judges who have blocked major pieces of the
president's agenda, in some cases arguing that judges have no power to
intrude on the president's authority.
Trump is apparently
not aware that there are three branches of the government, so he needs to be
stopped wherever possible.
President Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media a single
sentence that appears to encapsulate his attitude as he tests the nation’s
legal and constitutional boundaries in the process of upending the federal
government and punishing his perceived enemies.
“He who saves his Country does
not violate any Law,” Trump wrote, first on his social media platform Truth
Social, then on social platform X.
By late afternoon, Trump had pinned the statement to the top of
his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he
wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his
message in the evening.
The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon
Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.
Nonetheless, the sentiment was familiar: Trump, through his words and actions, has repeatedly suggested that surviving two assassination attempts is evidence that he has divine backing to enforce his will.
He has brought a far more aggressive attitude
toward his use of power to the White House in his second term than he did at
the start of his first. The powers of the presidency that he returned to were
bolstered by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that he is presumptively immune
from prosecution for any crimes he may commit using his official powers.
During his first weeks in office, Trump has signed numerous
executive orders that pushed at the generally understood limits of presidential
power, fired numerous officials and dismantled an agency in clear violation of
statutory limits, and frozen spending authorized by Congress without clear
authority. Many of his policy moves have been at least temporarily
frozen by judges.
Such moves include trying to unilaterally rewrite the definition
of birthright citizenship — a right enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th
Amendment — to exclude babies born to mothers living in the country without
legal permission, and mass firings of public servants, ignoring civil service
protection laws. He has all but shuttered the agency responsible for foreign
aid, dismissed prosecutors who investigated him, and fired Senate-confirmed
watchdogs without giving proper notice to Congress or justification.
Trump’s team has embraced an expansive version of the so-called
unitary executive theory, a legal ideology that says that the Constitution
should be understood as forbidding Congress from placing any limits on the
president’s control of the executive branch, including by creating independent
agencies or restricting the president’s ability to summarily fire any
government official at will.
The Trump administration at first did not offer a public legal
rationale for blowing through the statutes that provide various kinds of job
protections to the officials that Trump has summarily fired, including members
of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board.
But last week, the administration offered something of an
explanation.
Sarah M. Harris, the acting
solicitor general at the Justice Department, sent a letter to Congress saying
the department would not defend the constitutionality of statutes that limit
firing members of independent agencies before their terms were up. Such laws
say the president cannot remove such an official at will, but only for a
specific cause like misconduct.
While not using the phrase “unitary executive theory,” Harris’
letter echoed its ideological tenet that the Constitution does not allow
Congress to enact a law “which prevents the president from adequately
supervising principal officers in the executive branch who execute the laws on
the president’s behalf” and said the Trump administration will try to
get the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent to the contrary.
That, at least, is a theory under which at least some of what
Trump has been doing is lawful: It is not illegal to disregard an
unconstitutional statute.
But, taken at face value, Trump’s statement Saturday went much
further, suggesting that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an
otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the
country.
For now, there is little that
any of us can do to reverse the damage that is being done to our country. Although
we see evidence of Trump’s stupidity on nearly a daily basis, I try not to get
too worked up about things, since all it would do is raise my blood pressure.
It’s OK to shout obscenities at
the television, and have an occasional glass of wine, but my advice is to simply
take a deep breath, and try to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
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