OPINION:
The U.S. Supreme Court has made it official: the president of the United States can now literally get away with murder.
In a devastating 6-3 ruling in Trump v. United States that was equal parts politically short-sighted, self-serving partisan, and utterly devoid of any pretense that the president is anything other than a dictator, the Supreme Court has validated what Richard Nixon once claimed: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
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The damage has indeed been done. Indubitably. Irrevocably. Unarguably.
Every American should be outraged, offended and afraid of what this ruling means for the future of our nation.
There can be no more pretending that we live in a constitutional republic. It’s all out in the open now. This is a dictatorship: Hitler has finally stepped out of the shadows.
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The rule of law may have been on life support for a long time, but this ruling pulls the plug.
The facts of the case itself, which asks whether former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution on charges that he attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, are less important than the ramifications of this ruling, which go so far as to dramatically expand the power of the presidency, rendering whoever occupies the Oval Office lawless and unaccountable.
This is exactly how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
In a textbook example of doublespeak, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Supreme Court’s six-person conservative majority, essentially declared that presidents are not above the law and then turned right around and ensured that presidents can do whatever they want in their official capacity without being held accountable or criminally liable.
As Justice Roberts noted, “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.”
Here’s the thing, however: this isn’t anything new. Not really.
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Although the Constitution invests the president with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts — powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler — empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.
As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one president expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future presidents.”
Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a president’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”
In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him or herself near dictatorial powers.
All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents — to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability — were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.
These presidential powers — acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president — enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.
So you see, the Supreme Court didn’t make the president a dictator. It merely confirmed what we’ve been warning about all along: the president is already an imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional dictator with permanent powers.
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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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