SCOTUS declines to delay Trump’s sentencing by 5-4 vote
By The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday denied a request by President-elect Donald Trump to halt proceedings in his New York criminal hush money case, clearing the way for him to be sentenced on Friday morning.
The 5-4 decision came hours after New York state’s highest appeals court refused to delay Trump’s sentencing.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would have granted Trump’s request for an emergency stay, the court said in a brief order.
The majority determined that Trump’s sentencing would impose a “relatively insubstantial” burden on his presidential responsibilities, since he is expected to receive a sentence that entails no actual punishment, the order said.
Those five justices — with Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining liberals Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — were also unswayed by Trump’s arguments about the use of certain evidence during his criminal trial.
Those alleged evidentiary violations “can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal,” the majority ruled, according to the order.
Trump was convicted last May in state court in Manhattan of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s attorneys in Wednesday’s Supreme Court filing argued that all further proceedings should be put on hold while the president-elect appeals the guilty verdicts in New York.
The case should be stayed to “prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the Presidency and the operations of the federal government,” they wrote in the 51-page filing.
They argued that Trump, as president-elect, is immune from criminal prosecution. New York trial court Judge Juan Merchan had rejected that claim.
Since Judge Merchan has all but officially declared that Trump will be subject to no actual punishment whatsoever, the argument that there’s some basis in federal law for delaying the sentencing is particularly frivolous, even by the standards of Trump’s lawyers’ typical legal arguments.
Still, the symbolic value of Trump being a convicted felon isn’t zero, and this case is an example of why people who say it doesn’t matter whether the SCOTUS is 5-4 or 6-3 or 7-2 are wrong. That Roberts and Barrett are the center of the court is deeply depressing, but on the other hand it could be Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, and if Sotomayor and Kagan don’t ever get realistic about strategic retirement, it might well eventually be that way.