“Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was one of the most impressive pieces of progressive quackery ever produced by SCOTUS,” tweeted historian Brion McClanahan.
Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, wrote that “I think that while Sotomayor’s dissent is a bit over the top, her concerns are more well-founded than I would have thought.” But a day later he took it back: “Having read more, and having talked to a half dozen legal beagles I trust, I’m less dismayed than I was yesterday. I do think the ‘Absolute Immunity’ stuff is unnecessary. I also think ACB’s concurrence is better than Roberts’ opinion.”
They were discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. the United States.
“The chief justice insisted that the president ‘is not above the law,’” explains the Associated Press. “‘But in a fiery dissent for the court’s three liberals,’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, ‘In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.’
Reading from her opinion in the courtroom, Sotomayor said, “Because our Constitution does not shield a former president from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.” Sotomayor said the decision “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.”
The protection afforded presidents by the court, she said, “is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless.”
Sotomayor’s case against an imperial, unaccountable president seems quite reasonable at first blush, but Glenn Greenwald devoted a huge chunk of an episode of his System Update (Rumble) to mocking it.
“The narrative that we were fed” about the Trump v; U.S. ruling and the doctrine of presidential immunity generally, Greenwald said, “was an absolute fairy tale about American history and political life. To listen to Democrats and their media allies tell it, you would think that presidents have a long history in the United States of being criminally accountable for the illegal acts they undertook in office; that it has always been the case that presidents enjoy no immunity that any other citizen of the United States doesn’t enjoy; and that all of a sudden, out of the blue, a conservative, fanatical court driven by ideological and political considerations to protect Donald Trump, invented out of whole cloth some kind of new immunity that never previously existed.”
Greenwald, who has been fighting the notions of executive immunity for decades now, in his journalistic work, expressed his incredulity over the Sotomayor reaction, and reaction of most media Democrats. They seem to be burying their past commitments to a notion they now say they find abhorrent.
But Greenwald does not call Sotomayor’s dissent “progressive quackery,” though.
1 reply on “Sotomayor’s Quackery?”
For lack of a still better term, let us use “Ginsburgism” for the doctrine that the US Constitution simply is what some vaguely defined group of progressive people think that it ought to be. Right now, the Ginsburgists insist that the President ought not to enjoy much if anything in the way of legal immunity for official acts, and thence that the Constitution does not provide such immunity.
Many of us would agree with part of that proposition; specifically that the President ought not to enjoy much if anything in the way of legal immunity for official acts. But we understand that the Constitution is law, and that laws properly mean exactly and only what was logically implied by their wording at the time of adoption, regardless of what we might think would be best law (and otherwise regardless of the various and conflicting goals of the persons involved in passage).
The Constitution would be improved by Amendments of some sorts. The US Supreme Court has no legal right to effect those Amendments. Most of the people yowling on television about the decision in question will fail to support an Amendment to reduce the immunity of the President; many of them will actively work to subvert passage of such an Amendment, exactly because the Presidents most threatened by such Amendments would be those who most exceed their Constitutional authority, the technocratic dictators whom “progressives” most admire.