How the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling opened the door to a shocking question: Can presidents kill their rivals?

VSCan a president order the assassination of a rival and get away with it?

This is an absurd hypothesis raised by an appellate judge to highlight the literally incredible and dangerous consequences of the legal argument of Donald Trump’s lawyers.

But it had the effect of a shocking warning from a Supreme Court justice in a groundbreaking ruling this week that shields Trump from accountability for crimes committed in office.

There is no legal precedent that would give a president such authority. But according to legal scholars, advocates and liberal Supreme Court justices, the decision appears to open the door to the question of whether the commander in chief can legally commit murder.

“This whole assassination story seems far-fetched unless you consider it in light of what we just experienced on January 6,” said Donald Sherman, executive vice president and chief legal counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group.

“This is no longer an academic exercise. This is no longer theoretical. This is no longer the providence of academics in their ivory towers. We know what Trump said. We know what this court said. We know what Trump did. We know that on January 6, Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, threatening the lives of members of Congress and the sitting vice president,” Sherman said. The independent.

“How far do you think we have to go to get to the scenario that the Supreme Court says falls under this blanket immunity?”

The ruling by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court grants the president absolute “immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts committed in his “official” capacity. If a president relies on these “core” constitutional powers—for example, activating the military to respond to a crisis—he could ostensibly be immune from prosecution for the murder of a political opponent.

The court’s decision does not make the act in question legal. The military would not be immune from prosecution for committing a crime, and it would not be following illegal orders. But a lawless president would be limited only by his own administration and his willingness to test those constraints, legal experts say.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the court had created “a lawless zone around the president, upending the status quo that has existed since the court’s founding.”

“Ordering Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immunized,” she wrote. “Arranging a military exchange for a pardon? Immunized. Immunized, immune, immune. Even if these nightmare scenarios never come to pass, and I pray they never do, the damage is done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has been irrevocably changed.”

Of course, she did not invent this assassination scenario.

The first revelation came during an appeals court hearing in January, when Judge Florence Pan asked Trump’s lawyer whether he thought a president could order SEAL Team 6 to “assassinate a political rival” without facing criminal prosecution.

The fact that the Supreme Court majority did not specifically provide for such sweeping exemptions to this “absolute” immunity – and only mentioned actions for which Trump himself is immune – Since — alarmed legal analysts.

“If there’s ever a threat to democracy, Joe Biden can say he’s facing it,” said John Dean, a former White House adviser to Richard Nixon and a key witness in the Watergate scandal. “That’s a blurry line and it will be until there’s a body of case law on it.”

If elected, Trump will return to the White House with a team of ideologically tested loyalists and armed with an authoritarian plan for his rule. Two massive Supreme Court decisions that demolished the so-called administrative state during this term paved the way for his centralization of power, and a decision granting him legal immunity will undoubtedly allow him to act with impunity and put an end to his criminal affairs.

The majority decision makes clear that “unofficial” acts can still be prosecuted. But it may be impossible for prosecutors to find evidence that a president acted unofficially, because the Supreme Court has largely made all communications or other documents inadmissible as evidence under its new immunity threshold.

How can prosecutors present a case if they can’t even use what a president says or does while in office as evidence against them?

“The president’s conversations with the secretary of defense and the attorney general can’t even be considered evidence,” Sherman said. “What this really means is that whether we have a democracy depends solely on the whims and temperament of the person who holds the office of president.”

The decision in Trump vs. USA fails to distinguish whether an “official” act clearly within the president’s power becomes “unofficial” if he commits a crime in doing so, leaving a gaping hole in understanding the court’s new formula for curbing abuse.

“While the President may have the power to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example,” Justice Jackson wrote, “the question here is whether the President has the ability to remove the Attorney General, for example, by poisoning him to death.”

The lurid and absurd legal arguments surrounding Trump’s actions — with analysts now debating whether a president can legally kill someone — reflect something more sinister in the state of politics and the Supreme Court, legal experts say.

“As absurd as some of these possibilities seem to us today, the fact that we are having this conversation now seemed completely unthinkable 10 years ago,” Georgia attorney Allegra Lawrence-Hardy told reporters Monday.

“Whether it’s not illegal or it’s illegal but you can’t be prosecuted for it, we lived in a country where there was more respect for the law than realistically considering the possibility that the president would assassinate his political opponents,” said Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Constitutional Law.

“What are you talking about?” Sherman said. The independent. “The Court does not issue advisory opinions. It takes into account real cases and controversies. (…) God help us if the Court ever has to deal with this issue, because the only way to do so is to try to do so.”