The Supreme Court is protecting the president from you. It should be the other way around.
Hope you enjoyed the last real Independence Day.
Before we start: Sarah and I did an early Secret pod this morning and I want to warn you: It’s entirely self-indulgent. We wanted to talk about the last week and what it’s been like to have people yelling at us for not supporting Joe Biden. Lots of feelings.
If this isn’t your cup of tea, maybe skip this week’s episode?
But I do have one insight.
People who have argued to stay with Biden tend to view his debate performance as *a debate performance*—just a very bad one.
But it was more than that. You should view it as a health event—because that’s how voters are seeing it. And the reality is that American voters get freaked out about health when it comes to presidents. They can live with a governor or a senator having a health event. But in their lizard brains, voters run away from the idea of presidential candidates who might die in office.
Anyway, the Secret pod is here.
1. Power
Comedian Trae Crowder summed up this year’s July 4 better than I could have:
You ever had your parents call up and say, “Mee-Maw turns 97 on Saturday so we want everyone to come into town, put aside their differences, and try to get along for her sake because we’re pretty sure that this is going to be her very last birthday.”
Right? Well this July 4th is like that, but for America.
Yup. That’s about what it was. Even watching the great Alfonso Ribeiro hosting Capitol Fourth last night felt like that.1 You could see it in the crowd reaction shots. Normally the camera would cut to giddy, sweaty, tourists on the National Mall acting like goofballs because they’re thrilled to be on America’s Jumbotron.
Last night the crowd shots were mostly of folks who looked like they weren’t sure if they were at a party or a wake.
America is in an ongoing constitutional crisis. We are less than four years removed from our first attempted coup. The man most likely to be our next president is a convicted felon. If this man loses the election, he has already promised chaos. If he wins, he has said he would like to be a dictator.
And last week the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are, for all intents and purposes, immune from criminal prosecution.
Not great, Bob.
A few days ago I had a brief exchange with a good friend who is a conservative, but anti-Trump, legal scholar. I was complaining about the SCOTUS decision and he offered a limited defense of it. He said that, should Trump be elected president, we may be grateful for the SCOTUS ruling because it will protect Joe Biden from spurious criminal prosecutions launched by Trump’s Justice Department or rogue attorney generals in, say, Texas.
I take his point. My counter is that I do not care about Biden.2
Whenever Biden leaves his office, he will be a former president. If Ken Paxton tries to prosecute him, Biden will be fine because he has both the facts and the law on his side—as well as the resources to mount the most vigorous defense possible.
I do not worry about protecting presidents from legal accountability launched by people lower on the food chain.
When you think about the SCOTUS immunity decision this way it becomes clear how backwards the Court’s priorities are.
The conservative majority focused on protecting the president. They thought that the overriding concern in all scenarios is that the president must be allowed the latitude to act as he sees fit without worrying about his future.
In this view, the most powerful person on the planet is merely a potential victim who must be shielded and insulated from possible harms.
Which is insane. Because the president is the most powerful person on the planet.
When so much power is vested in a single person, we should be worrying about protecting everyone else from him.