The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week regarding former President Donald Trump‘s claims of absolute presidential immunity for the actions he took while allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
During the arguments, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appeared to receive Trump’s claim favorably, which drew the ire of legal analysts.
Opting to be more concerned with the imagined prosecutions of future presidents than with the current prosecution of Donald Trump, Alito contorted the issue to portray a world in which — if SCOTUS did not grant complete immunity — no president would ever leave office because of fear of post-presidential prosecution.
Alito said: “A stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully.” He added: “Will [no immunity] not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
Renowned Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe responded to Alito’s comments by amplifying a quote from the recently published Slate article, ‘A Supreme Court Justice Gave Us Alarming New Evidence That He’s Living in MAGA World.’
“What Alito did is essentially say: ‘I’m living in MAGA world.’ Which views this case as a totally bogus prosecution ginned up by totally bogus people as part of a vindictive prosecution by Joe Biden. And Alito is also implicitly saying that if Donald Trump gets reelected, you…
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) April 28, 2024
From the article, Tribe pulled a quote from Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan, who previously served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Karlan said: “What Alito did is essentially say: ‘I’m living in MAGA world.’ Which views this case as a totally bogus prosecution ginned up by totally bogus people as part of a vindictive prosecution by Joe Biden. And Alito is also implicitly saying that if Donald Trump gets reelected, you just know he’s going to prosecute people vindictively too. He really has lost faith in the entire system. Or at least he’s prepared to lose faith in the system enough to decide this case in Trump’s favor.”