A riot of their own
By 
Rick Hasen observes that Jack Smith’s brief is as much an indictment of John Roberts and the Dred Scott of the 21st century as it is of Trump:
It’s rare to simultaneously feel red-hot anger and wistfulness, especially when merely reading a document. But those are exactly the emotions that washed over me when I read the redacted version of special counsel Jack Smith’s brief reciting in detail the evidence against Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. The anger is at the Supreme Court for depriving the American people of the chance for a full public airing of Donald Trump’s attempt to use fraud and trickery to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory before voters consider whether to put Trump back in office beginning January 2025. The wistfulness comes with the recognition that there is about an even chance that this will be the last evidence produced by the federal government of this nefarious plot. If Donald Trump wins election next month, the end of this prosecution is certain and the risks of future election subversion heightened.
[…]
Trump’s detailed plot to overturn the results of the election was brazen and a major threat to American democracy. Because of it, even today, millions of Trump supporters believe the last election was stolen, and that primes the public for new attempts at subversion. Trump’s new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, had to go along with the lie at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, refusing to admit the incontrovertible truth that Trump lost the 2020 election.
And now perhaps the most important case in American history may never get to a jury and the American public will never get a chance to learn about this evidence and a jury’s judgment of this evidence before they consider returning Donald Trump to office.
But worst of all is the United States Supreme Court. Smith’s Wednesday filing was not a trial brief laying out the case. It is instead a document meant to determine which of Trump’s acts in attempting to subvert the 2020 election were “official acts” that are immune from prosecution and which are unofficial acts, or official acts that may be subject to prosecution (under a set of rules very protective of the former president). Nowhere are the stakes clearer and the difficulty of the task more explicit than when Smith attempts to rebut the presumptive immunity the court offered in regard to Trump’s conversations with Pence seeking to pressure him not to certify the electoral vote:
The defendant’s charged conduct directly contravenes [America’s] foundational principles. He sought to encroach on powers specifically assigned by the Constitution to other branches, to advance his own self-interest and perpetuate himself in power, contrary to the will of the people. As such, applying a criminal prohibition to the defendant’s conduct would not pose any danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch; rather, it would advance the Constitution’s structural design to prevent one Branch from usurping or impairing the performance of the constitutional responsibilities of another Branch.
The New York Times recently reported on the internal Supreme Court deliberations, and they paint Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the Trump immunity decision, as having turned from a justice known for seeking common ground and minimalist outcomes to one set out to protect the office of the presidency at all costs. The opinion was so focused on the risks to the vigorousness of the activities of future presidents that could come from the threat of future prosecutions that it was willing to ignore the current threat to democracy today from Trump’s actions in 2020, not to mention his continued insistence that he won the last election.
It’s infuriating to be reminded in such detail about the behavior that the Republicans on the Supreme Court sought to immunize, particularly since any “opinion for the ages” horseshit notwithstanding the opinion was clearly tailored to provide the broadest possible immunity for specifically for Trump’s attempt to violently steal the election. John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are all full in knowing accessories after the fact to the Plot Against America.