Many conservatives now accept with bored acquiescence the near certainty that Trump, if elected, will dismiss both federal indictments against himself. Yet it would be an abuse far greater than the Saturday Night Massacre that once shocked the nation...
1/6
In Oct 1973, Nixon fired AG Elliot Richardson & then Dep AG Wm Ruckelshaus for refusing to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was subpoenaing Nixon’s White House tapes. The firings galvanized bipartisan support for impeachment proceedings ...
/2
... which began 10 days later. Quaint though it may now seem, US District Judge Gerhard Gesell even ruled, later on, that the Cox’s dismissal had been illegal. ...
/3
... Yet the SCOTUS majority in Trump v US contemptuously chided the bipartisan lower courts for trying to let justice be done before Trump has a chance to abuse power to derail it. They even purported to be acting expeditiously ...
/4
... though we are, right now, pointlessly counting 32 more days off the calendar for SCOTUS’s ruling to become final, because the court declined to make it immediate. (The pause permits the losing party to seek rehearing—inconceivable here as the Court well knows.) ...
/4
... Is the president now above the law? Half-heartedly, the majority claims (s)he is not—with asterisks galore. They say the dissents are “fear-mongering” with “extreme hypotheticals”—which they tellingly don’t deign to refute. ...
/5
... Justice Thomas disdains that tack. He quips that the once-revered notion has been largely meaningless all along. Immunity from prosecution for official acts *is* the law, he writes, archly. Silly Nixon, silly us, silly forefathers for imagining otherwise.
/6-end
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