The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he should be shielded from criminal prosecution keeps the justices at the center of election-year controversy for several more months and means any verdict on Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 vote will not come before summer.
The country’s highest court wants the final word on the former president’s assertion of immunity, even if it may ultimately affirm a comprehensive ruling of the lower federal court that rejected Trump’s sweeping claim.
For Trump, Wednesday’s order amounts to another win from the justice system he routinely attacks. The justices’ intervention in the case, Trump v. United States, also marks another milestone in the fraught relationship between the court and the former president.
Cases related to his policies and his personal dealings consistently roiled the justices behind the scenes. At the same time, Trump, who appointed three of the nine justices, significantly influenced the court’s lurch to the right, most notably its 2022 reversal of nearly a half century of abortion rights and reproductive freedom.
You know, that’s pretty interesting to consider. Wonder what his performance as AG can tell us about how he would have been on SCOTUS.
Maybe we can still find out, if Biden admin resizes the court. Is it too late to do so before the presidential immunity hearing?
I think Biden had said long ago that he wouldn’t do that no matter what; in this political environment it probably wouldn’t happen anyway.
By the way, appellate courts sit right below the U.S. Supreme Court and there are currently 13 of them.
Some legal experts argue there should be one supreme court justice per appellate court, because that was the ratio when the appellate court system was first established in 1891 – nine supreme court justices and nine appellate courts.
Garland was Obama’s compromise choice to make it through the Republican Senate. Before the pick was made, one Senator (might have been Graham, but I can’t find a quote right now) specifically said that that he thought Obama’s pick would be DoA, because it would be too liberal, and not a more acceptable, centrist choice like Merrick Garland.
That’s what prompted McConnell (and Graham, who was Judiciary Chairman IIRC) to simply sit in the nomination and not allow it to progress. Because they knew that if it were sent to a vote, it would have passed, and gambled on having the open seat drive turnout for Trump.
It Garland was on the court instead of Gorsuch, things might not be all that much different. Recall that Dobbs was decided 6-3, which means that, all other things being equal, Gorsuch’s vote was unnecessary.