Photo Courtesy Fulton County Sheriff’s Office
Watching the legal doings, you may be feeling what Neal Brown experienced the other day, just not with mayonnaise on your head.
If you didn’t see or hear, nearly five gallons of the white gunk was dumped in celebration upon the West Virginia University football coach’s head after his team won the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
He wore a ball cap and forewarned that removing the stuff from a previous coach’s hair took months.
Seeing this, I thought of a worse matter: having defendant Donald Trump in our hair as he plays appellate games before he can be tried on the many crimes for which he is charged.
We who abide by all the laws watch daily as the man’s gall cascades on our heads – buckets and buckets.
Never has it been more sickening than for this corrupt schemer and self-dealer to ask the Supreme Court to declare his actions as president immune from criminal law.
Unbearable audacity from a blazing orange ball of gall.
This immunity matter shouldn’t take so long to resolve.
It should be done in a hiccup, between the olive and the martini.
Ah, but Donald Trump will tie up our courts once more at unimaginable cost on the most ridiculous claim any public servant could make.
“I could break any law I want.”
Republicans, every Republican, should be saying, “The gall of that guy. I wouldn’t vote for such a crook.”
It shouldn’t take the prosecutorial poetry of Jack Smith to make hash of Trump’s claim.
“The implications of the defendant’s broad immunity theory are sobering,” writes the special counsel who persuaded grand juries to indict him on a host of felonies.
Such license, wrote Smith, would allow a future president to accept a bribe to award big-dollar contracts, to have the FBI frame political opponents, or to have the military liquidate them. An immune president could sell secrets to foreign enemies.
In each scenario, Smith writes, “the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief, or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”
Those who think immunity should allow Trump to do anything should be alarmed beyond measure that President Biden, President Harris, President Whitmer, or President Newsom would be so empowered.
That’s what this ex-president seeks in a bid to save the rawhide that serves as his skin.
My god, the gall.
The immunity absurdity is directly relative to Trump’s bid to convince the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it clearly states about insurrectionists, which Trump most clearly and proudly is. (What does the “stop” in “Stop the Steal” – incitement for a mob while Congress certifies the people’s verdict — mean to you?)
For one, Trump asserts that the president is not an “officer of the United States,” per Section 3.
Conservative Judge Michael Luttig, the most vocal advocate of disqualifying Trump via the 14th, said under this dangerous leap of logic, a president “isn’t an officer of the United States; he IS the government.”
And don’t forget Trump’s ridiculous “double jeopardy” claim regarding the 14th Amendment: that he can’t be charged with insurrection because he was “acquitted” in a Senate trial over Jan. 6 — in which a bipartisan majority, just not a supermajority, voted for his removal as president. Therefore, Trump claims, he can’t be tried for the same thing.
To that, roll tape of Trump’s counsel in the Senate trial saying the criminal courts were the place to address Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, including his doing nothing to stop the bloodshed and destruction.
Ah, but that immunity claim: It is the audacity that no American should countenance. It is also legal effrontery that ties up the courts in a clear bid to stall Trump’s criminal trials ahead of an election he sees as his ticket out of incarceration.
Trump is running two races, the most important of which is against the clock.
“Unthinkable,” says former assistant U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal, that any former president would be so self-serving as to appeal to our highest court for protection from criminal laws.
How many times, in the saga of this dangerous politician, has “unprecedented” emerged from the lips of learned observers?
Once more. The court has never taken up the issue of presidential immunity, says Katyal, “But that’s because we’ve never had a president who has the gall to make such a ridiculous, absurd proposition.”
Against their own instincts and interests, some Americans will root for the orange ball of gall in all legal gambits, the salad dressing in their eyes blinding them to the actions of a wannabe tyrant.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
