Running out the clock for Trump

Bouie on the Kafkaesque goings-on at the SCOTUS yesterday:

I wish I had faith that the Supreme Court would rule unanimously against Trump. But having heard the arguments — having listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh worry that prosecution could hamper the president and having heard Justice Samuel Alito suggest that we would face a destabilizing future of politically motivated prosecutions if Trump were to find himself on the receiving end of the full force of the law — my sense is that the Republican-appointed majority will try to make some distinction between official and unofficial acts and remand the case back to the trial court for further review, delaying a trial even further.

Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.

It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.

The most absurd feature of the entire argument was the insistence by the court’s right-wingers that they didn’t want this case to be about Trump specifically, but rather about the majestic general legal principles at stake. The only reason this case exists is because Donald Trump represents the very first instance of an American president trying to stay in power after he had been defeated in an election. The case is about Trump, because the problem is Trump and Trumpism.

We can debate the relative extent to which Trump is cause and symptom of the fascist turn in American politics — he’s obviously both — but the problem of the moment has nothing to do with majestic legal principles, and everything to do with the necessity of getting rid of this particular personification of the cancer on the body politic.

And the right wing of the SCOTUS doesn’t understand that because it doesn’t want to understand that.