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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSamuel Alito's Resentment Goes Full Tilt on a Black Day for the Court
https://newrepublic.com/post/181023/samuel-alito-trump-immunity-black-day-supreme-courtNo paywall link
https://archive.li/xxUtd
On the day Donald Trump took office in January 2017, pondering what he might do to the countrys democratic norms and institutions, I wrote these words: Trump will destroy them, if keeping Trump on top requires it. Or try to. He might not succeed. And that is where we rest our hopeon conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump. Mark my words: It will come to this.
That hope seemed not misplaced back in 2020 and 2021, when a number of liberal and conservative judges, some of the latter appointed by Trump himself, handed Trump 60 or so legal defeats as he attempted to unlawfully overturn the election results. But after Thursday at the Supreme Court? That hope is dead. The conservative judges, or at least most of them, on the highest court in the land are very clearly choosing Trump over our institutions. And none more belligerently than Samuel Alito.
His line of questioning to Michael Dreeben, the attorney arguing the special counsels case, was from some perverse Lewis Carroll universe:
Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?
Lets look to something Id have thought lawyers and judges took seriously: historical evidence. American democracy has existed for nigh on 250 years, and power has been transferred from a president to his successor a grand total of 40 times (not counting deaths in office). On 11 occasions, a challenger has defeated a sitting incumbentthat is, a situation that creates the potential for some particularly bitter and messy post-election shenanigans.
*snip*
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Samuel Alito's Resentment Goes Full Tilt on a Black Day for the Court (Original Post)
Nevilledog
Apr 26
OP
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(108,335 posts)1. K&R
returnee
(50 posts)2. Idiotic vs gymnastically tortured logic to support TSF.
Alito should point to the clause of the Constitution wherein former presidents are entitled to peaceful retirement after an attempted coup. Criminally disingenuous.