I may not be a legal scholar — although my daughter, the law professor, is — but I’ve read enough law and history to know what the Supreme Court just did, and undid, with its dangerous ruling on presidential immunity.

It turned American democracy upside down.

It made a mockery of the Founders and of the democratic republic they devised specifically to ensure that no man is a king, no man is above the law. 

It not only ensured that Donald Trump probably can’t be successfully tried for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, but also that, were he to return to the White House, Trump would have free rein to carry out his promised retribution tour and worse.

And, maybe worst of all, the 6-3 conservative court majority has made plain, as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic: “These are not justices; these are Trump cronies. This is not legal reasoning; it’s vandalism.”

The case is called Trump v. United States. The decision should be called John Roberts et al v. United States.

This is the court we’re stuck with. This is the radical court that has overturned decades of settled law. 

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This is the court that, with its collective thumb leaning heavily on one side of the scales of justice, has become a Trump-enabling accessory after the fact.

I’m old enough to remember when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his many crimes against democracy. The ruling from the Roberts court, which pretends to revere history and precedent, basically says Nixon’s pardon was unnecessary. 

In response, former Nixon aide John Dean was moved to tweet this:

“‘When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.’” Richard Nixon, 1974. Affirmed US Supreme Court, 2024.”

And Trump? You remember when he insisted Article II of the Constitution meant he “can do whatever I want.”

Bingo. Nixon was not a crook, Watergate was just an apartment complex, and if Trump is a crook who tried to steal an election, who really cares?

So, I guess under this ruling, as many pundits have suggested, Biden really could call in the Navy Seals and settle this whole election crisis by tomorrow. Or do the new rules apply only to Republican presidents?

Clearly, the ruling is a warning — a lights-flashing, sirens-wailing warning — that Trump, a far greater danger even than Nixon, cannot be elected again. Nixon had an enemies list. It contained 20 people. It could fit on a piece of paper. Printing Trump’s list would require destroying a forest or two, although I guess he could also use the leftover material to build those promised mass detention camps.

Now, we must hope that Biden and Democratic leaders are taking full notice. It’s past time to think that the courts will do anything to deter Trump. And I’m pretty sure Biden won’t be calling in the Seals.

The voters are the only ones who can stop Trump, but according to the polling, Biden is trailing. Election-data guru Nate Silver says his model gives Trump a 66% chance of winning. And that was before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, which has left many calling for Biden to step aside.

It’s not just the so-called bedwetters who are worried. Nancy Pelosi called for Biden — and for Trump, too, of course — to prove his mental fitness, even if it means taking a cognition test. As she told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, “I think it’s a legitimate question to say about Biden’s debate performance, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’”

The central point of Biden’s campaign is that American democracy is under threat, and that was before the immunity decision. Of course it’s legitimate to ask if Biden, who shows no signs of stepping aside, is up to the task of defending democracy, which would include defeating Trump. And if he isn’t, Democrats need to find someone who can.

That idea that no one is above the law — including a president — is the nation’s founding principle. If you’ve read the Declaration of Independence, which I’m assuming most of the justices have, you have to know that much.

As Thomas Paine wrote a few weeks after the July 4th declaration, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” I wonder what Paine would say if he knew someday souls could still be tried in America, but not a president who attempts to overturn an election. 

Recognizing the need to assure the public that he understood presidents shouldn’t be monarchs, Chief Justice John Roberts included in his majority opinion the wording that “The president is not above the law.” 

And then he wrote pages and pages of opinion — little of which seemed to be based either in law or on the historical record — saying just the opposite.

The 6-3 majority ruled that a president had “absolute immunity” from legal prosecution in his “official” and “constitutional” roles. The justices ruled he had “presumptive” immunity in much else. Much of the ruling was left intentionally unclear — like what separates an official presidential act from an unofficial one — but the ruling was clear enough.

It said, for example, Trump was “absolutely immune from prosecution” for engaging with the Justice Department in his attempt to hatch a bogus-electors scheme to keep him in office. So Prosecutor Jack Smith has to drop that part of the case. Not only that. Roberts also made clear that the official deals, including those with the DOJ, couldn’t even be used as evidence against Trump for any criminal unofficial acts. 

Without this protection, Roberts wrote, the presidency could be “enfeebled.” He said the Constitution — if not in so many words, or maybe in no words at all — envisioned a “vigorous executive.” 

So, the president, we see, must be protected from the danger of rogue prosecutions. But the people won’t be protected from the danger of rogue presidents.

Hardly anyone expected this decision. When the Trump lawyers filed their immunity claim, it was seen as one more delay tactic. But now?

Now, because of the ruling, Trump’s sentencing in the book-fixing, porn-star payoffs has been delayed. Of course it has.

In her powerful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the two other liberal justices, wrote that, in Roberts’ view, any president acting in his official capacity “is now a king above the law.”

And what might an all-powerful king do? Sotomayor went right back to the Navy Seals.

”When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune. Immune. Immune.”

And the rest of us without this kind of immunity? I think you know. In the time of year when we’re normally shooting off celebratory fireworks, we might as well be left shooting up disinfectant.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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