I wrote books on Trump's crimes — but did not see the Supreme Court immunity ruling coming

While writing Criminology on Trump and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy, I had never imagined that even this extreme Supreme Court supermajority would rule in favor of Donald Trump’s quest for presidential immunity. More importantly, the justices’ legal chicanery has retroactively allowed a former president and all future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions by untenably conflating “private interests” with “official duties.” In very different words, these Supreme Court justices have “nullified” Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. The question for this criminologist became: “How or why did crime and criminality – specifically a criminal conspiracy to overturn a presidential election – become the official business of a constitutionally empowered president of the United States?” To find out how the Supreme Court avoided the answer to my question, obstructed justice or impeded due process, and eventually rendered such an absurd and perverted decision, you will have to read their convoluted logic for yourself and attempt to make sense of text that stubbornly defies logic, legal foundation or conservatives’ beloved principle of “originalism.” Or, less painfully, you can read about it from Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who’s now a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law. The issue that the Supreme Court agreed to decide — which it never should have after trial judge Tanya Chutkan and a three-judge appellate panel had ruled unanimously that Trump could be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6 — was this: whether, and to what extent, Trump enjoyed “presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” As Vance writes below, the conservative supermajority issued a fairly direct answer finding that there were “three different categories of presidential conduct, and a different rule about immunity applies to each one,” as follows: 1.) It should be the other way around.” From The Washington Post : “Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling poses risk for democracy.” From the Los Angeles Times : “We should all dissent from the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and not respectfully.” From CNN Politics : “The Supreme Court just gave presidents a superpower.” From PBS : “A President could pocket a bribe for a pardon, stage a military coup to retain power, order the killing of a rival by the Navy’s SEAL Team Six – and be protected.” From Project Syndicate : “The US Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution entitles former President Donald Trump to “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions related to his efforts to overturn the November 2020 election.” From Talking Points Memo : “The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to American democracy.” From Slate : “In its awful immunity ruling… benefitting Donald Trump, the court seems so worried about future threats to democracy that could come from the possibility of bogus future criminal prosecutions of former presidents that it is willing to let a legitimate election prosecution over a current threat against democracy go by the wayside.” From The New York Times : “The Supreme Court creates a lawless presidency.” From Salon : “The Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can be a dictator.” From Politico : “The Supreme Court gave Trump a stunning Gift – and rewrote the Constitution.” From Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid : “Raise your hand if you remember learning about the separation of powers, and the fact that we have a democratically elected President with limited powers, not a fascist empowered dictator with unlimited powers?” From Mother Jones : “The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights.” Last month, in another assault on constitutional democracy, a 6-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts for the Supreme Court concluded in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine is dead, and that the era of executive branch agency rule is effectively over.