I’m NO lawyer…..
But I simply do NOT believe the people on the High Court are gonna give Donald Trump and future US President’s ABSOLUTE Immunity in office and afterwards….
The guys who put together the government of this country centuries ago did NOT WANT a ‘King’ leading the place….
They had come to America to get away from THAT…..
Even Alito and Thomas KNOW this…..
The below linked piece talks about another power the President of the United States of America HAS that goes back to the ‘King’…..
The power to pardon….
The power has been absolute per the Constitution…..
While there is a ‘procedure’ in place in the Justice Dept. to check on any choice?
The Law gives the President a ALMOST absolute ‘Right’ to carry out his wishes with pardons….
The only constraints are from within the Constitution itself….
Or?
The Supreme’s?
The problem with the absolutist conception of the pardon power is that it collides with the core idea of American democracy itself, which is structured around the idea that the people are the ultimate boss. This bottom-up framework assumes that political figures and federal judges serve at the pleasure of the people, who can fire them at the ballot box or through related levers of accountability. Foundationally, no one is above the law, and no person can be the judge in their own case.
The United States represents a repudiation of the monarchy of King George III, which historically fastened sovereignty on a belief that kings were divinely ordained by God. Not only was the monarch above the law — he was the law. A pardon was a reflection of the king’s unilateral mercy at a time when few formalized rules of criminal justice existed to protect the individual. It also enabled leaders to exercise amnesty for the good of the state — by pardoning rebels or military deserters, for example.
The pardon power made its way into Article II of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 with limited discussion at the state ratifying conventions. The text contains only one express exception: Presidents cannot pardon impeachments. (The British Parliament imposed the same constraint on the king in 1700.) At the Constitutional Convention, additional limits — such as a ban on pardons for treason, Senate approval of pardons and a requirement that convictions precede pardons — were all considered and rejected.
Although anti-Federalists expressed alarm over the possibility of presidential abuse, the delegates seemed more concerned about an overly powerful Congress. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 74 that affording the president an undivided pardon power by “sole fiat” would “naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution,” as “one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of the government, than a body of man.” The “principal argument” for the power, however, was amnesty: If an insurrection or rebellion occurred in the U.S., Hamilton added, “a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”
The Supreme Court has since acknowledged some restraints on the pardon power, which largely go unrecognized in how it is characterized these days. Presidents cannot pardon crimes that haven’t yet been committed, for example, and if a defendant paid a penalty into the U.S. Treasury as part of a sentence, presidents cannot use a pardon to reimburse them — that would violate Congress’s authority under the Constitution’s Appropriation Clause. Like most parts of the Constitution, the pardon power is rationally subject to external constraints imposed by competing constitutional provisions. A president who pardoned all white federal felons in the United States but excluded people of color would violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
All this means that the justices and the government probably went too far in their exchanges around how the pardon power might shape the scope of hypothetical criminal immunity. Among the conservative justices, there seemed to be a modicum of agreement that the existence of the pardon power shores up the case that presidents, like unlimited monarchs, enjoy significant immunity from prosecution for crimes cloaked in White House formalities…
….
Sometime in the next month, a Supreme Court majority appears poised to rule that presidents can commit crimes with impunity — but only for official acts. For private criminal acts, they can still be prosecuted.
But this line between official and private for now is illusory. When the justices explored that distinction during oral argument and asked about categories of powers that might clearly be immune from prosecution if used to commit crimes, one that came up repeatedly was the pardon power.
When Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the counsel for the government what “core” powers would be indisputably untouchable by the criminal laws, for example, he responded: “The core kinds of activities that the court has acknowledged [is] a pretty small set, but things like the pardon power …” Justice Elena Kagan likewise asked about core executive functions shielded from criminal liability: “Pardon. Veto?” Counsel responded: “Well, with respect to the core powers, we think those are just things that can’t be regulated at all, like the pardon power and veto.” The pardon power, they all apparently assumed, is absolute….
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Take that in: Counsel for Smith appeared to concede that a president could instruct an aide to obstruct justice and then pardon him or her and it would be constitutional because any such actions are beyond the scope of the federal criminal laws. Is that really what the framers intended?.
These admissions around the pardon power are significant because Trump, like the justices, has the pardon power on his mind. When asked by a Time Magazine reporter whether he would consider pardoning every one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, hundreds of whom have been convicted of federal crimes and are now in jail, he said, “Yes, absolutely.” Last year, Trump stated publiclythat he discussed pardoning himself with his lawyers while still president…..